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Sorting in Column Stores

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Abstract

In recent years, we have seen a number of new database architectures based on the idea of vertical fragmentation of relations. These architectures target the analysis of huge amounts of relational data, because vertical fragmentation facilitates column scans which are common in analytic applications at the expense of single-tuple operations. Although sorting is a common operation for analytics, few is known about sorting vertically fragmented relations. This paper compares various possibilities to apply (external) merge sort to vertically fragmented relations on different layers of the memory hierarchy and gives hints on when to apply which one. We propose a Greedy algorithm to find the optimum mixture of steps that leads to a sorted version of a given relation which is stored column-wise.

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Notes

  1. We assume that there are no unused attributes in \(\mathcal{A}\), otherwise those would simply be ignored, which is possible due to the assumed column-orientedness.

  2. http://www.dbms2.com/2009/09/03/oracle-11g-exadata-hybrid-columnar-compression/.

  3. Disks have a physical block size as well (512 B or 4 kB) but a database or operating system may choose to combine several physical into one logical block.

  4. Although this statement sounds questionable from today’s perspective [4].

  5. http://www.tpc.org.

  6. Due to time and space constraints, the merge sort was only executed for data sets in memory, not on disk.

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  1. Institute of Computer Science Database and Information Systems Group, Freie Universität Berlin, Takustraße 9, 14195, Berlin, Germany

    Daniel Bößwetter

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  1. Daniel Bößwetter
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Correspondence to Daniel Bößwetter.

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Bößwetter, D. Sorting in Column Stores. Datenbank Spektrum 11, 91–100 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13222-011-0054-6

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