Correlation Aware Optimizations for Analytic Databases

Hideaki Kimura, Brown University

1:00pm Friday 9 March 2012, ITE 325b, UMBC

Recent years have seen that the analysis of large data-sets is crucially important in a wide range of business, governmental, and scientific applications. For example, research projects in astronomy need to analyze petabytes of image data taken from telescopes. Providing a fast and scalable analytical data management system for such users has become increasingly important.

The major bottlenecks for analytics on such big data are disk- and network-I/O. Because the data is too large to fit in RAM, each query causes substantial disk I/O. Traditional database systems provide indexes to speed up disk reads, but many analytic queries do not benefit from indexes because data is scattered over a large number of disk blocks and disk seeks are prohibitively expensive. Furthermore, such huge data sets need to be partitioned and distributed over hundreds or many thousands of nodes. When a query requires more than one data at once, such as a query involving a JOIN operation, the data management system must transmit a large amount of data over the network. For example, the Shuffle phase in Map-Reduce systems copies file blocks over the network and causes a significant bottleneck in many cases.

Our approach to tackling these challenges in big data analytics is to exploit correlations. I will describe our correlation-aware indexing, replication, and data placement which make big data analytics faster and more scalable.

Finally, if time allows, I will also introduce another on-going project to develop a scalable transactional processing system on modern hardware in collaboration with Hewlett-Packard Laboratories.

Hideaki Kimura is a doctoral candidate in the Computer Science Department at Brown University. His main research interests are in data management systems. His dissertation research with Prof. Stan Zdonik is on correlation-based optimizations for large analytic databases. He also worked on transaction processing systems exploiting modern hardware at HP Labs.

Host: Anupam Joshi
See http://csee.umbc.edu/talks for more information

From Diane Lee, Dean of Undergraduate Education

Thank you for your outpouring of compassion and support for the Meyerhoff Scholars Program since I shared the sad news about the passing of our colleague LaMont Toliver, who served as the program’s Director and Assistant Dean of Undergraduate Education.

I want to share details with you about the services for LaMont.

On Wednesday, March 7, a viewing will be held with the Toliver family from 5 to 7 p.m. at March Funeral Home West, located at 4300 Wabash Avenue, Baltimore, 21215. (The funeral home will also be open for viewing hours from 8:30 a.m. to 8 p.m., and you can view directions here.)

On Thursday, March 8, a “Family Hour” and viewing will be held from 10 to 11 a.m. at The People’s Community Baptist Church at 31 Norwood Road, Silver Spring, 20905 (view directions here). A service will be held immediately following the viewing.

Members of the UMBC community are welcome to attend these events. Flowers may be sent to the church.

Students also are planning an on-campus memorial service, and I will let you know the details when they are available. Additionally, information will be posted to the Meyerhoff website, where you can also share your memories of LaMont.