Processing a Trillion Cells per Mouse Click
Venue
PVLDB, vol. 5 (2012), pp. 1436-1446
Publication Year
2012
Authors
Alex Hall, Olaf Bachmann, Robert Buessow, Silviu-Ionut Ganceanu, Marc Nunkesser
BibTeX
Abstract
Column-oriented database systems have been a real game changer for the industry in
recent years. Highly tuned and performant systems have evolved that provide users
with the possibility of answering ad hoc queries over large datasets in an
interactive manner. In this paper we present the column-oriented datastore
developed as one of the central components of PowerDrill. It combines the
advantages of columnar data layout with other known techniques (such as using
composite range partitions) and extensive algorithmic engineering on key data
structures. The main goal of the latter being to reduce the main memory footprint
and to increase the efficiency in processing typical user queries. In this
combination we achieve large speed-ups. These enable a highly interactive Web UI
where it is common that a single mouse click leads to processing a trillion values
in the underlying dataset.
