Modern data-intensive applications generate vast amounts of floating-point data, essential for fields like databases and machine learning. While many compression techniques focus on space efficiency, there is a lack of benchmarks evaluating both compression and query performance, especially in areas like in-situ query execution on compressed data and machine learning tasks such as distance measurement and k-nearest neighbors (k-NN) in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. This paper addresses this gap by evaluating popular lossless floating-point compression methods on three key factors: compression efficiency, database operations performance, and machine learning query performance. We implemented these techniques in Rust and integrated them into an open-source library for use with columnar engines. Our comparison highlights trade-offs between compression efficiency and query performance, showing that no single approach excels in all areas, and some methods trade off compression for slower performance.

Query scheduling is a critical task that directly impacts query performance in database management systems (DBMS). Deeply integrated schedulers, which require changes to DBMS internals, are usually customized for a specific engine and can take months to implement. In contrast, non-intrusive schedulers make coarse-grained decisions, such as controlling query admission and re-ordering query execution, without requiring modifications to DBMS internals. They require much less engineering effort and can be applied across a wide range of DBMS engines, offering immediate benefits to end users. However, most existing non-intrusive scheduling systems rely on simplified cost models and heuristics that cannot accurately model query interactions under concurrency and different system states, possibly leading to suboptimal scheduling decisions. This work introduces IconqSched , a new, principled non-intrusive scheduler that optimizes the execution order and timing of queries to enhance total end-to-end runtime as experienced by the user — query queuing time plus system runtime. Unlike previous approaches, IconqSched features a novel predictor, Iconq , which treats the DBMS as a black box and accurately estimates the system runtime of concurrently executed queries under different system states. Using these predictions, IconqSched is able to capture system runtime variations across different query mixes and system loads. It then employs a greedy scheduling algorithm to effectively determine which queries to submit and when to submit them. We compare IconqSched to other schedulers in terms of end-to-end runtime using realistic workload traces. On Postgres, IconqSched reduces end-to-end runtime by up to 16.5% on average and 33.6% in the tail. Similarly, on Redshift, it reduces end-to-end runtime by up to 14.4% on average and 22.9% in the tail.

Cloud service providers commonly use standard benchmarks like TPC-H and TPC-DS to evaluate and optimize cloud data analytics systems. However, these benchmarks rely on fixed query patterns and fail to capture real execution statistics of production cloud workloads. Although some cloud database vendors have recently released real workload traces, these traces alone do not qualify as benchmarks, as they typically lack essential components (i.e., queries and databases). To overcome this limitation, this paper studies a new problem of workload synthesis with real statistics , which generates synthetic workloads that closely approximate real execution statistics, including key performance metrics and operator distributions. To address this problem, we propose PBench, a novel workload synthesizer that constructs synthetic workloads by (1) selecting and combining workload components from existing benchmarks and (2) augmenting new workload components. This paper studies the key challenges in PBench. First, we address the challenge of balancing performance metrics and operator distributions by introducing a multi-objective optimization-based component selection method. Second, to capture the temporal dynamics of real workloads, we design a timestamp assignment method that progressively reines workload timestamps. Third, to handle the disparity between the original workload and the candidate workload, we propose a component augmentation approach that leverages large language models (LLMs) to generate additional workload components while maintaining statistical idelity. Experimental results show that PBench reduces approximation error by up to 6X compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Abstract This paper evaluates the suitability of Apache Arrow, Parquet, and ORC as formats for subsumption in an analytical DBMS. We systematically identify and explore the high-level features that are important to support efficient querying in modern OLAP DBMSs and evaluate the ability of each format to support these features. We find that each format has trade-offs that make it more or less suitable for use as a format in a DBMS and identify opportunities to more holistically co-design a unified in-memory and on-disk data representation. Notably, for certain popular machine learning tasks, none of these formats perform optimally, highlighting significant opportunities for advancing format design. Our hope is that this study can be used as a guide for system developers designing and using these formats, as well as provide the community with directions to pursue for improving these common open formats.

With the Internet of Things (IoT), a vast number of connected devices generate significant data, necessitating efficient compression techniques to manage storage costs and enhance query performance. However, “one-size-fits-all” approach to data compression is ineffective due to diverse applications, which vary in data characteristics, workloads, and hardware limitations. This paper introduces AdaEdge, a dynamic, hardware-conscious compression selection framework tailored for resource-constrained devices. AdaEdge is a best-effort compression selection frame- work designed to preserve application-critical information as much as possible within system constraints. It enhances the use of limited system resources through a dynamic data compression policy that considers the staleness and the significance of the data. AdaEdge applies a multi-armed bandit algorithm to assist compression selection, optimizing workload targets such as compression ratio, compression throughput, workload accuracy, or their weighted combinations. It supports both lossy and lossless compression selection, adapting to hardware constraints. It operates in both online and offline modes, addressing network constraints for edge nodes and evolving data policies to preserve workload-specific information. AdaEdge improves machine learning task accuracy by up to 30% over baseline within the same storage budget and by up to 20% in scenarios where lossless methods fall short due to low compression ratios. AdaEdge also shows robustness against data shifts and hardware variability.

Causal inference can quantify cause-effect relationships in domains as varied as medicine, economics and public policy. Production computer systems exhibit a similar level of complexity and a recurring need to diagnose problems quickly. However, systems are only observed imperfectly, often via long, messy, semi-structured logs. In this work, we want to accelerate large systems debugging by applying causal inference over logs, enabling engineers to diagnose problems and assess interventions in a principled manner. Our framework achieves this through two human-in-the-loop modules: (1) The Candidate Cause Ranker , through which one can determine the causes of a variable without running a full causal discovery algorithm; and (2) the Interactive Causal Graph Refiner , which helps engineers compute an unbiased estimation of their effect of interest without extensive manual causal graph verification. Both modules are powered by the insight that only part of the causal graph of the system is needed to correctly quantify a given effect of interest. We also provide a data preparation pipeline, the Log Converter , which transforms raw, messy, real-world logs into an appropriate tabular input for causal inference, using methods drawn from data transformation, cleaning, and extraction. We evaluate LOGos, a prototype implementation, on both real-world and synthetic logs and find that: (1) The Candidate Cause Ranker achieved an average precision 1.08×-18× higher than the baselines, in interactive time; (2) The Interactive Causal Graph Refiner required a number of causal judgments 1.61 × - 16.83× lower than the baselines; and (3) The latency of Log Converter scaled linearly with three measures of the complexity of a log: length, distinct templates, and fraction of tokens that are variables.

This paper evaluates the suitability of Apache Arrow, Parquet, and ORC as formats for subsumption in an analytical DBMS. We systematically identify and explore the high-level features that are important to support efficient querying in modern OLAP DBMSs and evaluate the ability of each format to support these features. We find that each format has trade-offs that make it more or less suitable for use as a format in a DBMS and identify opportunities to more holistically co-design a unified in-memory and on-disk data representation. Our hope is that this study can be used as a guide for system developers designing and using these formats, as well as provide the community with directions to pursue for improving these common open formats.

With the explosive growth of high-dimensional data, approximate methods emerge as promising solutions for nearest neighbor search. Among alternatives, quantization methods have gained attention due to the fast query responses and the low encoding and storage costs. Quantization methods decompose data dimensions into non-overlapping subspaces and encode data using a different dictionary per subspace. The state-of-the-art approach assigns dictionary sizes uniformly across subspaces while attempting to balance the relative importance of subspaces. Unfortunately, a uniform balance is not always achievable and may lead to unsatisfactory performance. Similarly, hardware-accelerated quantization methods may sacrifice accuracy to speed up the query execution. We propose a Variance-Aware Quantization (VAQ) method to encode data by intelligently adapting dictionary sizes to subspaces to alleviate these significant drawbacks. VAQ exploits intrinsic dimensionality reduction properties to derive the subspaces and only partially balances the importance of subspaces. Then, VAQ solves a constrained optimization problem to assign dictionary sizes proportionally to the importance of each subspace. In addition, VAQ accelerates the query execution by skipping data and subspaces through a hardware-oblivious algorithmic solution. To demonstrate the robustness of VAQ, we perform an extensive evaluation against quantization, hashing, and indexing methods using five large-scale benchmarking datasets. VAQ significantly outperforms the strongest hashing and quantization methods in accuracy while achieving up to 5× speedup. Compared to the fastest but less accurate hardware-accelerated method, VAQ achieves a speedup@recall performance up to 14×. Importantly, a rigorous statistical comparison using over one hundred datasets reveals that VAQ significantly outperforms rival methods even with a half budget. Notably, VAQ's simple data skipping solution achieves competitive or better performance against index-based methods, highlighting the need for new indices for quantization methods.

Columnar databases rely on specialized encoding schemes to reduce storage requirements. These encodings also enable efficient in-situ data processing. Nevertheless, many existing columnar databases are encoding-oblivious. When storing the data, these systems rely on a global understanding of the dataset or the data types to derive simple rules for encoding selection. Such rule-based selection leads to unsatisfactory performance. Specifically, when performing queries, the systems always decode data into memory, ignoring the possibility of optimizing access to encoded data. We develop CodecDB, an encoding-aware columnar database, to demonstrate the benefit of tightly-coupling the database design with the data encoding schemes. CodecDB chooses in a principled manner the most efficient encoding for a given data column and relies on encoding-aware query operators to optimize access to encoded data. Storage-wise, CodecDB achieves on average 90% accuracy for selecting the best encoding and improves the compression ratio by up to 40% compared to the state-of-the-art encoding selection solution. Query-wise, CodecDB is on average one order of magnitude faster than the latest open-source and commercial columnar databases on the TPC-H benchmark, and on average 3x faster than a recent research project on the Star-Schema Benchmark (SSB).

Modern data-intensive applications often generate large amounts of low precision float data with a limited range of values. Despite the prevalence of such data, there is a lack of an effective solution to ingest, store, and analyze bounded, low-precision, numeric data. To address this gap, we propose Buff, a new compression technique that uses a decomposed columnar storage and encoding methods to provide effective compression, fast ingestion, and high-speed in-situ adaptive query operators with SIMD support.

Distance measures are core building blocks in time-series analysis and the subject of active research for decades. Unfortunately, the most detailed experimental study in this area is outdated (over a decade old) and, naturally, does not reflect recent progress. Importantly, this study (i) omitted multiple distance measures, including a classic measure in the time-series literature; (ii) considered only a single time-series normalization method; and (iii) reported only raw classification error rates without statistically validating the findings, resulting in or fueling four misconceptions in the time-series literature. Motivated by the aforementioned drawbacks and our curiosity to shed some light on these misconceptions, we comprehensively evaluate 71 time-series distance measures. Specifically, our study includes (i) 8 normalization methods; (ii) 52 lock-step measures; (iii) 4 sliding measures; (iv) 7 elastic measures; (v) 4 kernel functions; and (vi) 4 embedding measures. We extensively evaluate these measures across 128 time-series datasets using rigorous statistical analysis. Our findings debunk four long-standing misconceptions that significantly alter the landscape of what is known about existing distance measures. With the new foundations in place, we discuss open challenges and promising directions.

We propose PIDS, Pattern Inference Decomposed Storage, an innovative storage method for decomposing string attributes in columnar stores. Using an unsupervised approach, PIDS identifies common patterns in string attributes from relational databases, and uses the discovered pattern to split each attribute into sub-attributes. First, by storing and encoding each sub-attribute individually, PIDS can achieve a compression ratio comparable to Snappy and Gzip. Second, by decomposing the attribute, PIDS can push down many query operators to sub-attributes, thereby minimizing I/O and potentially expensive comparison operations, resulting in the faster execution of query operators.

Dictionary encoding, or domain encoding, is an important form of compression that uses a bijective mapping to replace attributes from a large domain (i.e. strings) with a finite domain (i.e. 32 bit integers). This encoding both reduces data storage and allows for more efficient query execution. Traditional dictionary encoding only supports efficient equality queries, while range queries require that encoded values are decoded for evaluating the predicates. An order preserving dictionary allows for range queries without decoding by ensuring that encoded keys follow the same order as the values in the dictionary. While this approach enables efficient queries it requires that the full set of values is known to create the mappings. In this work we bridge this gap by introducing mostly ordered dictionaries that use a best effort dictionary generation based on sampling the input dataset. Query evaluation on a mostly ordered dictionary avoids decoding when possible and gracefully degrades performance as the ratio of ordered values decreases.