Number of Distinct Values (NDV) estimation of a multiset/column is a basis for many data management tasks, especially within databases. Despite decades of research, most existing methods require either a significant amount of samples through uniform random sampling or access to the entire column to produce estimates, leading to substantial data access costs and potentially ineffective estimations in scenarios with limited data access. In this paper, we propose leveraging semantic information, i.e., schema, to address these challenges. The schema contains rich semantic information that can benefit the NDV estimation. To this end, we propose PLM4NDV, a learned method incorporating Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) to extract semantic schema information for NDV estimation. Specifically, PLM4NDV leverages the semantics of the target column and the corresponding table to gain a comprehensive understanding of the column's meaning. By using the semantics, PLM4NDV reduces data access costs, provides accurate NDV estimation, and can even operate effectively without any data access. Extensive experiments on a large-scale real-world dataset demonstrate the superiority of PLM4NDV over baseline methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/bytedance/plm4ndv.

In this paper, we describe veDB-HTAP, a highly integrated, efficient, and adaptive HTAP system recently built in ByteDance. veDB-HTAP adopts a highly integrated system architecture by leveraging the Secondary Engine mechanism provided by MySQL and provides a seamless query processing experience across OLTP and OLAP engines. In addition, we introduce a cost-based and machine-learning-based smart query router that significantly outperforms the rule-based query router used in ByteHTAP, a precursor of veDB-HTAP. A key design principle of veDB-HTAP is the collaboration and adaptability of major system components, including query planning, query execution, and unified storage. Our adaptive query execution can be classified into two categories: 1) adaptive execution that dynamically collects and utilizes runtime statistics for better query performance; 2) utilizing runtime resource information to achieve a high quality of service even under heavy workloads. The experiments show that veDB-HTAP can achieve more than 3× speedup for TPC-H while consuming only one-third of the resources compared to ByteHTAP.

Virtual indexes play a crucial role in database query optimization. However, with the rapid advancement of cloud computing and AI-driven models for database optimization, traditional virtual index approaches face significant challenges. Cloud-native environments often prohibit direct conducting query optimization process on production databases due to stability requirements and data privacy concerns. Moreover, while AI models show promising progress, their integration with database systems poses challenges in system complexity, inference acceleration, and model hot updates. In this paper, we present VIDEX, a three-layer disaggregated architecture that decouples database instances, the virtual index optimizer, and algorithm services, providing standardized interfaces for AI model integration. Users can configure VIDEX by either collecting production statistics or loading from a prepared file, enabling high-accuracy what-if analysis using virtual indexes that yield query plans identical to production instances. Additionally, users can freely integrate new AI-driven algorithms into VIDEX. VIDEX has been deployed at ByteDance, serving thousands of MySQL instances daily and over millions of SQL queries for index optimization tasks.

Persistent key-value (KV) stores are widely used by cloud services at ByteDance as local storage engines, and RocksDB used to be the de facto implementation since it can be tailored to a variety of workloads and requirements. In this paper, we provide key insights into local storage engine usage at ByteDance, explain why the combination of highly write-intensive workloads and stringent requirements on cost efficiency and point lookup tail latency may pose challenges to a general-purpose local storage engine such as RocksDB, and present the design and implementation of LavaStore , a high-performance cost-effective local storage engine purpose-built to address these challenges. LavaStore achieves its design goals by selectively customizing a few components of a RocksDB-based, general-purpose local storage engine, including a distinct KV separation design that decouples garbage collection from compaction, a specialized engine type for the commonly recurring Write-Ahead-Logging workload, and a customized user-space append-only filesystem. LavaStore has been deployed to production with hundreds of thousands of running instances, storing more than 100 PB of data and serving billions of requests per second, bringing significant performance improvements and cost reductions to customers over their original local storage engines. For example, a ByteDance proprietary distributed OLTP database service has experienced a reduction in average write and read latency by 61% and 16%, respectively, and a ByteDance proprietary caching service has gained an 87% increase in write throughput with no more than 6% space overhead.

Estimating the Number of Distinct Values (NDV) is fundamental for numerous data management tasks, especially within database applications. However, most existing works primarily focus on introducing new statistical or learned estimators, while identifying the most suitable estimator for a given scenario remains largely unexplored. Therefore, we propose AdaNDV, a learned method designed to adaptively select and fuse existing estimators to address this issue. Specifically, (1) we propose to use learned models to distinguish between overestimated and underestimated estimators and then select appropriate estimators from each category. This strategy provides a complementary perspective by integrating overestimations and underestimations for error correction, thereby improving the accuracy of NDV estimation. (2) To further integrate the estimation results, we introduce a novel fusion approach that employs a learned model to predict the weights of the selected estimators and then applies a weighted sum to merge them. By combining these strategies, the proposed AdaNDV fundamentally distinguishes itself from previous works that directly estimate NDV. Moreover, extensive experiments conducted on real-world datasets, with the number of individual columns being several orders of magnitude larger than in previous studies, demonstrate the superior performance of our method.

Relational databases have gone through a phase of architectural transition from a monolithic to a distributed architecture to take full advantage of cloud technology. These distributed databases can leverage remote storage to maintain larger amounts of data than monolithic databases at the cost of increased latency. At ByteDance, we have built a distributed database called veDB based on the popular compute-storage separation architecture, however we have observed the system is unable to provide both low latency and high throughput required by some business critical applications, such as batched order processing.In this paper we present our novel approaches to tackle this problem. We have modified our system’s storage to utilize persistent memory (PMem) coupled with a remote direct memory access (RDMA) network to reduce read/write latency and increase the throughput. We also propose a query push-down framework to push partial computations to the PMem storage layer to accelerate analytical queries and reduce the impact of the transaction workload in the computation layer. Our experiments show that our methods improve the throughput by up to 1.5× and reduce latency by up to 20× for standard benchmarks and real-world applications.

In this work, we focus on the performance benchmarking problem of storage services in cloud-native database systems, which are widely used in various cloud applications. The core idea of these systems is to separate computation and storage in traditional monolithic OLTP databases. Specifically, we first present the characteristics of two representative real I/O workloads at the storage tier of ByteDance's cloud-native database veDB. We then elaborate the limitations of using standard benchmarks such as TPC-C and YCSB to resemble these workloads. To overcome these limitations, we devise a learning-based I/O workload benchmark called CDS-Ben. We demonstrate the superiority of CDSBen by deploying it at ByteDance and showing that its generated I/O traces accurately resemble the real I/O traces in production. Additionally, we verify the accuracy and flexibility of CDSBen by generating a wide range of I/O workloads with different I/O characteristics.

In recent years, at ByteDance, we see more and more business scenarios that require performing complex analysis over freshly imported data, together with transaction support and strong data consistency. In this paper, we describe our journey of building ByteHTAP, an HTAP system with high data freshness and strong data consistency. It adopts a separate-engine and shared-storage architecture. Its modular system design fully utilizes an existing ByteDance's OLTP system and an open source OLAP system. This choice saves us a lot of resources and development time and allows easy future extensions such as replacing the query processing engine with other alternatives. ByteHTAP can provide high data freshness with less than one second delay, which enables many new business opportunities for our customers. Customers can also configure different data freshness thresholds based on their business needs. ByteHTAP also provides strong data consistency through global timestamps across its OLTP and OLAP system, which greatly relieves application developers from handling complex data consistency issues by themselves. In addition, we introduce some important performance optimizations to ByteHTAP, such as pushing computations to the storage layer and using delete bitmaps to efficiently handle deletes. Lastly, we will share our lessons and best practices in developing and running ByteHTAP in production.