Scaling Package Queries to a Billion Tuples via Hierarchical Partitioning and Customized Optimization

Anh L. Mai, Pengyu Wang, Azza Abouzied, Matteo Brucato, Peter J. Haas, Alexandra Meliou

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articlepeer-review

Abstract

A package query returns a packageÐa multiset of tuplesÐthat maximizes or minimizes a linear objective function subject to linear constraints, thereby enabling in-database decision support. Prior work has established the equivalence of package queries to Integer Linear Programs (ILPs) and developed the SketchRefine algorithm for package query processing. While this algorithm was an important first step toward supporting prescriptive analytics scalably inside a relational database, it struggles when the data size grows beyond a few hundred million tuples or when the constraints become very tight. In this paper, we present Progressive Shading, a novel algorithm for processing package queries that can scale efficiently to billions of tuples and gracefully handle tight constraints. Progressive Shading solves a sequence of optimization problems over a hierarchy of relations, each resulting from an ever-finer partitioning of the original tuples into homogeneous groups until the original relation is obtained. This strategy avoids the premature discarding of high-quality tuples that can occur with SketchRefine. Our novel partitioning scheme, Dynamic Low Variance, can handle very large relations with multiple attributes and can dynamically adapt to both concentrated and spread-out sets of attribute values, provably outperforming traditional partitioning schemes such as kd-tree. We further optimize our system by replacing our off-the-shelf optimization software with customized ILP and LP solvers, called Dual Reducer and Parallel Dual Simplex respectively, that are highly accurate and orders of magnitude faster.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)1146-1158
Number of pages13
JournalProceedings of the VLDB Endowment
Volume17
Issue number5
DOIs
StatePublished - 2024
Event50th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, VLDB 2024 - Guangzhou, China
Duration: Aug 25 2024Aug 29 2024

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Science (miscellaneous)
  • General Computer Science

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