Locality-aware Partitioning in Parallel Database Systems

Parallel database systems horizontally partition large amounts of structured data in order to provide parallel data processing capabilities for analytical workloads in shared-nothing clusters. One major challenge when horizontally partitioning large amounts of data is to reduce the network costs for a given workload and a database schema. A common technique to reduce the network costs in parallel database systems is to co-partition tables on their join key in order to avoid expensive remote join operations. However, existing partitioning schemes are limited in that respect since only subsets of tables in complex schemata sharing the same join key can be co-partitioned unless tables are fully replicated. In this paper we present a novel partitioning scheme called predicate-based reference partition (or PREF for short) that allows to co-partition sets of tables based on given join predicates. Moreover, based on PREF, we present two automatic partitioning design algorithms to maximize data-locality. One algorithm only needs the schema and data whereas the other algorithm additionally takes the workload as input. In our experiments we show that our automated design algorithms can partition database schemata of different complexity and thus help to effectively reduce the runtime of queries under a given workload when compared to existing partitioning approaches.