Publication Data
HyperLogLog in Practice: Algorithmic Engineering of a State of The Art Cardinality Estimation Algorithm
Abstract: Cardinality estimation has a wide range of applications and
is of particular importance in database systems. Various algorithms have been proposed
in the past, and the HyperLogLog algorithm is one of them. In this paper, we present a
series of improvements to this algorithm that reduce its memory requirements and
signi?cantly increase its accuracy for an important range of cardinalities. We have
implemented our proposed algorithm for a system at Google and evaluated it empirically,
comparing it to the original HyperLogLog algorithm. Like HyperLogLog, our improved
algorithm parallelizes perfectly and computes the cardinality estimate in a single
pass.
