arXiv subjects

Alex Galakatos

Publications and source records attributed to Alex Galakatos.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2020

FITing-Tree: A Data-aware Index Structure

Index structures are one of the most important tools that DBAs leverage to improve the performance of analytics and transactional workloads. However, building several indexes over large datasets can often become prohibitive and consume valuable system resources. In fact, a recent study showed that indexes created as part of the TPC-C benchmark can account for 55% of the total memory available in a modern DBMS. This overhead consumes valuable and expensive main memory, and limits the amount of space available to store new data or process existing data. In this paper, we present FITing-Tree, a novel form of a learned index which uses piece-wise linear functions with a bounded error specified at construction time. This error knob provides a tunable parameter that allows a DBA to FIT an index to a dataset and workload by being able to balance lookup performance and space consumption. To navigate this tradeoff, we provide a cost model that helps determine an appropriate error parameter given either (1) a lookup latency requirement (e.g., 500ns) or (2) a storage budget (e.g., 100MB). Using a variety of real-world datasets, we show that our index is able to provide performance that is comparable to full index structures while reducing the storage footprint by orders of magnitude.

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arXiv2019

DBPal: Weak Supervision for Learning a Natural Language Interface to Databases

This paper describes DBPal, a new system to translate natural language utterances into SQL statements using a neural machine translation model. While other recent approaches use neural machine translation to implement a Natural Language Interface to Databases (NLIDB), existing techniques rely on supervised learning with manually curated training data, which results in substantial overhead for supporting each new database schema. In order to avoid this issue, DBPal implements a novel training pipeline based on weak supervision that synthesizes all training data from a given database schema. In our evaluation, we show that DBPal can outperform existing rule-based NLIDBs while achieving comparable performance to other NLIDBs that leverage deep neural network models without relying on manually curated training data for every new database schema.

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arXiv2015

The End of Slow Networks: It's Time for a Redesign

Next generation high-performance RDMA-capable networks will require a fundamental rethinking of the design and architecture of modern distributed DBMSs. These systems are commonly designed and optimized under the assumption that the network is the bottleneck: the network is slow and "thin", and thus needs to be avoided as much as possible. Yet this assumption no longer holds true. With InfiniBand FDR 4x, the bandwidth available to transfer data across network is in the same ballpark as the bandwidth of one memory channel, and it increases even further with the most recent EDR standard. Moreover, with the increasing advances of RDMA, the latency improves similarly fast. In this paper, we first argue that the "old" distributed database design is not capable of taking full advantage of the network. Second, we propose architectural redesigns for OLTP, OLAP and advanced analytical frameworks to take better advantage of the improved bandwidth, latency and RDMA capabilities. Finally, for each of the workload categories, we show that remarkable performance improvements can be achieved.

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arXiv2014

Tupleware: Redefining Modern Analytics

There is a fundamental discrepancy between the targeted and actual users of current analytics frameworks. Most systems are designed for the data and infrastructure of the Googles and Facebooks of the world---petabytes of data distributed across large cloud deployments consisting of thousands of cheap commodity machines. Yet, the vast majority of users operate clusters ranging from a few to a few dozen nodes, analyze relatively small datasets of up to a few terabytes, and perform primarily compute-intensive operations. Targeting these users fundamentally changes the way we should build analytics systems. This paper describes the design of Tupleware, a new system specifically aimed at the challenges faced by the typical user. Tupleware's architecture brings together ideas from the database, compiler, and programming languages communities to create a powerful end-to-end solution for data analysis. We propose novel techniques that consider the data, computations, and hardware together to achieve maximum performance on a case-by-case basis. Our experimental evaluation quantifies the impact of our novel techniques and shows orders of magnitude performance improvement over alternative systems.

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