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BBoxDB: a distributed and highly available key-bounding-box-value store

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Abstract

BBoxDB is a distributed and highly available key-bounding-box-value store, which is designed to handle multi-dimensional big data. To handle large amounts of data, the software splits the stored data into multi-dimensional shards and spreads them across a cluster of nodes. Unlike existing key-value stores, BBoxDB stores each value together with an n-dimensional, axis parallel bounding box. The bounding box describes the spatial location of the value in an n-dimensional space. Multi-dimensional data can be retrieved by using range queries, which are efficiently supported by indices. A space partitioner (e.g., a K-D Tree, a Quad-Tree or a Grid) is used to split the n-dimensional space into disjoint regions (distribution regions). Distribution regions are created dynamically, based on the stored data. BBoxDB can handle growing and shrinking datasets. The data redistribution is performed in the background and does not affect the availability of the system; read and write access is still possible at any time. BBoxDB works with distribution groups, the data of all tables in a distribution group are distributed in the same way (co-partitioned). Spatial joins on co-partitioned tables can be executed efficiently without data shuffling between nodes. BBoxDB supports spatial joins out-of-the-box using the bounding boxes of the stored data. The joins are supported by a spatial index and executed in a distributed and parallel manner on the nodes of the cluster.

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Notes

  1. In Sect. 2.2 we discuss how n-dimensional point data could also be stored efficiently in a KVS.

  2. “If a geometry or geography shares any portion of space then they intersect.” [39]

  3. Most KVS use binary search on an key sorted storage to retrieve the tuples. For smaller datasets with a predictable size, hashing can be used and tuple retrieval can be done with a time complexity of \(\mathcal {O}(1)\).

  4. Ranges of keys are assigned to the nodes. For example node \(n_1\) stores the tuples whose keys begin with \([a-d]\) and node \(n_2\) stores the data for the keys \([e-g]\) and so on. When a node becomes overloaded, the data is repartitioned. The old range is split into two parts and another node becomes responsible for one of the parts.

  5. A hash function is applied on the tuple’s key. The value range of the function is mapped to the available nodes. The mapping determines which node stores which data. Consistent hashing [40] makes it possible to add and remove nodes without repartitioning the already stored data.

  6. An entity describes an object with one or more attributes. A record consists of a collection of fields and represents the technical view of a stored entity. In this paper, we use both terms synonymously.

  7. When the data type of the attribute is not numeric (e.g., a string, a JPEG encoded image), the values need to be mapped to a numeric data type before the min and max function can be applied. This can be done in several ways, like with a perfect hash function [55], treating the bytes of the datatype as numbers or with a custom mapping function.

  8. These indices are typically built independently on each node. Building a global index over the complete data requires a lot of coordination between the nodes; most DKVS are working with local secondary indices.

  9. DKVS like Cassandra are also providing eventual consistency to ensure that the system can deal with network or node outages. Eventual consistency does not mean that replicates become outdated for a long time. During the regular operation of the cluster without outages, the replicates are updated with every write operation [41, p. 162ff]. However, when outages occur, replicates can contain outdated data for a longer period before they eventually become synchronized with the last version of the data. Cassandra uses techniques like timestamps, gossip or read repair to ensure the replicates become synchronized. BBoxDB implements similar techniques. However, BBoxDB does not make improvements to these techniques. Therefore the implementation is not covered in this paper. Some implementation details can be found in the documentation of BBoxDB. [12].

  10. Usually, only the split positions are stored in a K-D Tree. The data structure in ZooKeeper instead contains a description of the space which is covered by a region. This makes it possible to reuse this data structure with other space partitioners (e.g., the Quad-Tree or the grid).

  11. On a replicated distribution group, several nodes could notice at the same time that the region needs to be split. This could lead to an unpredictable behavior of BBoxDB. To prevent such situations, the state of the distribution region is changed from ACTIVE to ACTIVE-FULL (see time \(t_1\) in Fig. 10). ZooKeeper is used as a coordinator that allows exactly one state change. Only the instance who performs this transition successfully executes the split.

  12. BBoxDB contains different resource allocators, which choose the nodes based on the available hardware such as free disk space, number of harddisks, total memory or total CPUs. The used resource allocator can be chosen when a distribution group is created.

  13. The efficiency of operations without a hyperrectangle (such as delete operations) is improved by another index. This is discussed in Section 3.10.

  14. Other functions for mapping the key to a point in the one-dimensional space can also be used. It is only important that all nodes use the same function for reading and writing index entries.

  15. As discussed in Sect. 3.1.2, each tuple contains a version timestamp to identify the most recent version of the tuple. To delete a tuple, a deletion marker is stored on disk (see Sect. 3.3.2). Also, deletion markers are stored together with a version timestamp. This behavior is used to store a new version of a tuple at time \(t_1\) and to apply a deletion operation later in time which affects only the tuples which have been stored before time \(t_1\). This is needed to ensure that a version of the tuple is stored at any time in BBoxDB. Otherwise, the tuple has to be deleted before the new version is stored. Such an implementation would lead to missing tuples in BBoxDB when a read request is executed by a client between the deletion and the put operation.

  16. Systems that use a static grid to work with multi-dimensional data like Distributed Secondo are using more partitions than nodes to allow a dynamic scaling of the cluster. 128 partitions is a common size in a cluster of ten nodes (see [46] for more details).

  17. A further problem with the grid approach is that the creation of the grid depends on the used dimension. For example, the grid operator in SECONDO needs a concrete implementation for each dimension. At the moment, SECONDO contains implementations for two- and three-dimensional grids. Using a non supported dimensionality leads to additional work for creating an appropriate grid operator. The K-D Tree in BBoxDB can be used immediately for any dimension without any adjustment being necessary.

  18. Tiny MD-HBase is limited to two-dimensional point data, therefore we compare tiny MD-HBase only with this dataset. To import the OSM point dataset, we modified Tiny MD-HBase and added an import function for GeoJSON data. In addition, we added some statistics about the scanned data. Our version of Tiny MD-HBase is available on GitHub [56].

  19. Spatial Hadoop can only handle two dimensional data, therefore range queries were performed only on the two dimensional datasets.

  20. The source code of the baseline approach can be found in the BBoxDB repository at GitHub [13].

  21. The source code of the baseline approach can be found in the BBoxDB repository at GitHub [13].

  22. We also tried to execute the spatial join with Spatial Hadoop only on bounding boxes. We created new datasets witch contained the bounding boxes of the OSM datasets. Afterwards, the spatial join was executed on these datasets. However, the execution time of the join increased by a factor of 5. We assume this is an error in the current implementation and therefore, we don’t show the execution time in the figure of the experiment.

  23. This paper covers only failures in components of BBoxDB. BBoxDB uses ZooKeeper as a coordinator. ZooKeeper itself is also a highly available distributed system, multiple nodes run ZooKeeper in parallel and select one leader. The leader is responsible for performing changes on the stored data. A leader failure results in a new leader election, during this time ZooKeeper clients have to wait before their requests are processed. A discussion of handling failures in ZooKeeper is already contained in papers like [38, p. 11] and not part of this paper.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful for the free license of JProfiler, which ej-technologies GmbH provided for the BBoxDB open source project. The profiler helped us to speed up the implementation of BBoxDB significantly.

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  1. Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, FernUniversität Hagen, 58084, Hagen, Germany

    Jan Kristof Nidzwetzki & Ralf Hartmut Güting

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Correspondence to Jan Kristof Nidzwetzki.

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Nidzwetzki, J.K., Güting, R.H. BBoxDB: a distributed and highly available key-bounding-box-value store. Distrib Parallel Databases 38, 439–493 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10619-019-07275-w

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