Event streaming is an increasingly critical infrastructure service used in many industries and there is growing demand for cloud-native solutions. Confluent Cloud provides a massive scale event streaming platform built on top of Apache Kafka with tens of thousands of clusters running in 70+ regions across AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure. This paper introduces Kora , the cloud-native platform for Apache Kafka at the core of Confluent Cloud. We describe Kora's design that enables it to meet its cloud-native goals, such as reliability, elasticity, and cost efficiency. We discuss Kora's abstractions which allow users to think in terms of their workload requirements and not the underlying infrastructure, and we discuss how Kora is designed to provide consistent, predictable performance across cloud environments with diverse capabilities.

We present new hash tables for joins, and a hash join based on them, that consumes far less memory and is usually faster than recently published in-memory joins. Our hash join is not restricted to outer tables that fit wholly in memory. Key to this hash join is a new concise hash table (CHT), a linear probing hash table that has 100% fill factor, and uses a sparse bitmap with embedded population counts to almost entirely avoid collisions. This bitmap also serves as a Bloom filter for use in multi-table joins. We study the random access characteristics of hash joins, and renew the case for non-partitioned hash joins. We introduce a variant of partitioned joins in which only the build is partitioned, but the probe is not, as this is more efficient for large outer tables than traditional partitioned joins. This also avoids partitioning costs during the probe, while at the same time allowing parallel build without latching overheads. Additionally, we present a variant of CHT, called a concise array table (CAT), that can be used when the key domain is moderately dense. CAT is collision-free and avoids storing join keys in the hash table. We perform a detailed comparison of CHT and CAT against leading in-memory hash joins. Our experiments show that we can reduce the memory usage by one to three orders of magnitude, while also being competitive in performance.

Compression has historically been used to reduce the cost of storage, I/Os from that storage, and buffer pool utilization, at the expense of the CPU required to decompress data every time it is queried. However, significant additional CPU efficiencies can be achieved by deferring decompression as late in query processing as possible and performing query processing operations directly on the still-compressed data. In this paper, we investigate the benefits and challenges of performing joins on compressed (or encoded) data. We demonstrate the benefit of independently optimizing the compression scheme of each join column, even though join predicates relating values from multiple columns may require translation of the encoding of one join column into the encoding of the other. We also show the benefit of compressing "payload" data other than the join columns "on the fly," to minimize the size of hash tables used in the join. By partitioning the domain of each column and defining separate dictionaries for each partition, we can achieve even better overall compression as well as increased flexibility in dealing with new values introduced by updates. Instead of decompressing both join columns participating in a join to resolve their different compression schemes, our system performs a light-weight mapping of only qualifying rows from one of the join columns to the encoding space of the other at run time. Consequently, join predicates can be applied directly on the compressed data. We call this procedure encoding translation. Two alternatives of encoding translation are developed and compared in the paper. We provide a comprehensive evaluation of these alternatives using product implementations of each on the TPC-H data set, and demonstrate that performing joins on encoded and partitioned data achieves both superior performance and excellent compression.

DB2 with BLU Acceleration deeply integrates innovative new techniques for defining and processing column-organized tables that speed read-mostly Business Intelligence queries by 10 to 50 times and improve compression by 3 to 10 times, compared to traditional row-organized tables, without the complexity of defining indexes or materialized views on those tables. But DB2 BLU is much more than just a column store. Exploiting frequency-based dictionary compression and main-memory query processing technology from the Blink project at IBM Research - Almaden, DB2 BLU performs most SQL operations - predicate application (even range predicates and IN-lists), joins, and grouping - on the compressed values, which can be packed bit-aligned so densely that multiple values fit in a register and can be processed simultaneously via SIMD (single-instruction, multipledata) instructions. Designed and built from the ground up to exploit modern multi-core processors, DB2 BLU's hardware-conscious algorithms are carefully engineered to maximize parallelism by using novel data structures that need little latching, and to minimize data-cache and instruction-cache misses. Though DB2 BLU is optimized for in-memory processing, database size is not limited by the size of main memory. Fine-grained synopses, late materialization, and a new probabilistic buffer pool protocol for scans minimize disk I/Os, while aggressive prefetching reduces I/O stalls. Full integration with DB2 ensures that DB2 with BLU Acceleration benefits from the full functionality and robust utilities of a mature product, while still enjoying order-of-magnitude performance gains from revolutionary technology without even having to change the SQL, and can mix column-organized and row-organized tables in the same tablespace and even within the same query.

This paper describes the presumed-either two-phase commit protocol. Presumed-either exploits log piggybacking to reduce the cost of committing transactions. If timely piggybacking occurs, presumed-either combines the performance advantages of presumed-abort and presumed-commit. Otherwise, presumed-either behaves much like the widely-used presumed-abort protocol.