Processing and Optimizing Main Memory Spatial-Keyword Queries

Important cloud services rely on spatial-keyword queries, containing a spatial predicate and arbitrary boolean keyword queries. In particular, we study the processing of such queries in main memory to support short response times. In contrast, current state-of-the-art spatial-keyword indexes and relational engines are designed for different assumptions. Rather than building a new spatial-keyword index, we employ a cost-based optimizer to process these queries using a spatial index and a keyword index. We address several technical challenges to achieve this goal. We introduce three operators as the building blocks to construct plans for main memory query processing. We then develop a cost model for the operators and query plans. We introduce five optimization techniques that efficiently reduce the search space and produce a query plan with low cost. The optimization techniques are computationally efficient, and they identify a query plan with a formal approximation guarantee under the common independence assumption. Furthermore, we extend the framework to exploit interesting orders. We implement the query optimizer to empirically validate our proposed approach using real-life datasets. The evaluation shows that the optimizations provide significant reduction in the average and tail latency of query processing: 7-to 11-fold reduction over using a single index in terms of 99th percentile response time. In addition, this approach outperforms existing spatial-keyword indexes, and DBMS query optimizers for both average and high-percentile response times.