Rank (i.e., top- k ) join queries play a key role in modern analytics tasks. However, despite their importance and unlike centralized settings, they have been completely overlooked in cloud NoSQL settings. We attempt to fill this gap: We contribute a suite of solutions and study their performance comprehensively. Baseline solutions are offered using SQL-like languages (like Hive and Pig), based on MapReduce jobs. We first provide solutions that are based on specialized indices, which may themselves be accessed using either MapReduce or coordinator-based strategies. The first index-based solution is based on inverted indices, which are accessed with MapReduce jobs. The second index-based solution adapts a popular centralized rank-join algorithm. We further contribute a novel statistical structure comprising histograms and Bloom filters, which forms the basis for the third index-based solution. We provide (i) MapReduce algorithms showing how to build these indices and statistical structures, (ii) algorithms to allow for online updates to these indices, and (iii) query processing algorithms utilizing them. We implemented all algorithms in Hadoop (HDFS) and HBase and tested them on TPC-H datasets of various scales, utilizing different queries on tables of various sizes and different score-attribute distributions. We ported our implementations to Amazon EC2 and "in-house" lab clusters of various scales. We provide performance results for three metrics: query execution time, network bandwidth consumption, and dollar-cost for query execution.

Cloud key-value stores are becoming increasingly more important. Challenging applications, requiring efficient and scalable access to massive data, arise every day. We focus on supporting interval queries (which are prevalent in several data intensive applications, such as temporal querying for temporal analytics), an efficient solution for which is lacking. We contribute a compound interval index structure, comprised of two tiers: (i) the MRSegmentTree (MRST), a key-value representation of the Segment Tree, and (ii) the Endpoints Index (EPI), a column family index that stores information for interval endpoints. In addition to the above, our contributions include: (i) algorithms for efficiently constructing and populating our indices using MapReduce jobs, (ii) techniques for efficient and scalable index maintenance, and (iii) algorithms for processing interval queries. We have implemented all algorithms using HBase and Hadoop, and conducted a detailed performance evaluation. We quantify the costs associated with the construction of the indices, and evaluate our query processing algorithms using queries on real data sets. We compare the performance of our approach to two alternatives: the native support for interval queries provided in HBase, and the execution of such queries using the Hive query execution tool. Our results show a significant speedup, far outperforming the state of the art.