Serverless query processing has become increasingly popular due to its advantages, including automated resource management, high elasticity, and pay-as-you-go pricing. For users who are not system experts, serverless query processing greatly reduces the cost of owning a data analytic system. However, it is still a significant challenge for non-expert users to transform their complex and evolving data analytic needs into proper SQL queries and select a serverless query service that delivers satisfactory performance and price for each type of query. This paper presents PixelsDB, an open-source data analytic system that allows users who lack system or SQL expertise to explore data efficiently. It allows users to generate and debug SQL queries using a natural language interface powered by fine-tuned language models. The queries are then executed by a serverless query engine that offers varying prices for different performance service levels (SLAs). The performance SLAs are natively supported by dedicated architecture design and heterogeneous resource scheduling that can apply cost-efficient resources to process non-urgent queries. We demonstrate that the combination of a serverless paradigm, a natural-language-aided interface, and flexible SLAs and prices will substantially improve the usability of cloud data analytic systems.

Cloud function (CF) services, such as AWS Lambda, have been applied as the new computing infrastructure in implementing analytical query engines. For bursty and sparse workloads, CF-based query engine is more elastic than the traditional query engines running in servers, i.e., virtual machines (VMs), and might provide a higher performance/price ratio. However, it is still controversial whether CF services are good suites for general analytical workloads, in respect of the limitations of CFs in storage, network, and lifetime, as well as the much higher resource unit prices than VMs. In this paper, we first present micro-benchmark evaluations of the features of CF and VM. We reveal that for query processing, though CF is more elastic than VM, it is less scalable and is more expensive for continuous workloads. Then, to get the best of both worlds, we propose Pixels-Turbo - a hybrid query engine that processes queries in a scalable VM cluster by default and invokes CFs to accelerate the processing of unpredictable workload spikes. In the query engine, we propose several optimizations to improve the performance and scalability of the CF-based operators and a cost-based optimizer to select the appropriate algorithm and parallelism for the physical query plan. Evaluations on TPC-H and real-world workload show that our query engine has a 1-2 orders of magnitude higher performance/price ratio than state-of-the-art serverless query engines for sustained workloads while not compromising the elasticity for workload spikes.

To benefit from the cloud's higher elasticity and price-efficiency, most modern data-lake engines support S3-like cloud object storage (COS) services as their optional or preferred underlying storage. Meanwhile, the widespread column stores, such as Parquet, are applied in these data lakes to improve analytical performance. However, as these column stores were designed for on-premise HDFS, they often suffer from the high latency of COS and deliver sub-optimal query performance. We observe that by optimizing the storage layout and data access pattern, we can effectively hide and mitigate the high latency. In this paper, we present Pixels, a column store optimized for the cloud that solves the problem by (1) the workload-driven storage layout optimization within and across the row group boundaries; (2) the I/O scheduling concerning the optimized storage layout and the performance characteristics of COS. They collectively improve the analytical performance in a transparent way that does not affect data ingestion and query execution in data lakes. Evaluations show that Pixels outperforms the state-of-the-art column store on COS by more than one order of magnitude on real-world workload and by 1.93x on TPC-H. Moreover, the performance of Pixels is also portable to HDFS.

Popular column stores such as ORC and Parquet have been widely used in many Hadoop-oriented data analysis systems. With the effective column skipping and data compression functionalities provided by column stores, wide tables with hundreds or even thousands of columns are applied by many big data analysis applications to avoid the expensive distributed joins. We found that the performance of such systems can be further improved by optimizing the physical data layout to fit certain workloads and system settings. However, it is nontrivial to perform such optimization manually. In this demo, we present a data layout optimization tool called Rainbow, which leverages workload-driven layout optimization algorithms to adjust data layouts adaptively without intervening the previous data blocks that have been stored. We also provide a Web UI for users to interact with the layout optimization process. Furthermore, Rainbow is open sourced with an accompanying benchmark for performance evaluation of wide tables.

Modern data analytical tasks often witness very wide tables, from a few hundred columns to a few thousand. While it is commonly agreed that column stores are an appropriate data format for wide tables and analytical workloads, the physical order of columns has not been investigated. Column ordering plays a critical role in I/O performance, because in wide tables accessing the columns in a single horizontal partition may involve multiple disk seeks. An optimal column ordering will incur minimal cumulative disk seek costs for the set of queries applied to the data. In this paper, we aim to find such an optimal column layout to maximize I/O performance. Specifically, we study two problems for column stores on HDFS: column ordering and column duplication. Column ordering seeks an approximately optimal order of columns; column duplication complements column ordering in that some columns may be duplicated multiple times to reduce contention among the queries' diverse requirements on the column order. We consider an actual fine-grained cost model for column accesses and propose algorithms that take a query workload as input and output a column ordering strategy with or without storage redundancy that significantly improves the overall I/O performance. Experimental results over real-life data and production query workloads confirm the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms in diverse settings.

There are many entity-attribute tables on the Web that can be utilized for enriching the entities of an RDF knowledge base. This requires the schema mapping (matching) between the Web tables and the RDF knowledge base. In this paper, we propose a feasible solution that is able to automatically search and rank entity-attribute tables from the Web, and effectively map the extracted tables with the RDF knowledge base with very few manual efforts.