Many useful tasks in data science and machine learning applications can be written as simple variations of matrix multiplication. However, users have difficulty performing such tasks as existing matrix/vector libraries support only a limited class of computations hand-tuned for each unique hardware platform. Users can alternatively write the task as a simple nested loop but current compilers are not sophisticated enough to generate fast code for the task written in this way. To address these issues, we extend an open-source compiler to recognize and optimize these matrix multiplication-like tasks. Our framework, called Amulet, uses both database-style and compiler optimization techniques to generate fast code tailored to its execution environment on CPUs. Amulet achieves speedups on a variety of matrix multiplication-like tasks compared to existing compilers while handling a much broader class of computations compared to libraries.

Analytic queries enable sophisticated large-scale data analysis within many commercial, scientific and medical domains today. Data skew is a ubiquitous feature of these real-world domains. In a retail database, some products are typically much more popular than others. In a text database, word frequencies follow a Zipf distribution with a small number of very common words, and a long tail of infrequent words. In a geographic database, some regions have much higher populations (and therefore data measurements) than others. Current systems do not make the most of caches for exploiting skew. In particular, a whole cache line may remain cache resident even though only a small part of the cache line corresponds to a popular data item. In this article, we propose a novel index structure for repositioning data items to concentrate popular items into the same cache lines. The net result is better spatial locality, and better utilization of limited cache resources. We develop a theoretical model for analyzing the cache utilization, and implement database operators that are efficient in the presence of skew. Our experimental evaluation on real and synthetic data shows that exploiting skew can significantly improve in-memory query performance. In some cases, our techniques can speed up queries by over an order of magnitude.

Modern information-intensive systems, including data management systems, operate on data that is mostly resident in RAM. As a result, the data management community has shifted focus from I/O optimization to addressing performance issues higher in the memory hierarchy. In this keynote, I will give a personal perspective of these developments, illustrated by work from my group at Columbia University. I will use the concept of abstraction as a lens through which various kinds of optimizations for modern hardware platforms can be understood and evaluated. Through this lens, some "cute implementation tricks" can be seen as much more than mere implementation details. I will discuss abstractions at various granularities, from single lines of code to whole programming/query languages. I will touch on software and hardware design for data-intensive computations. I will also discuss data processing in a conventional programming language, and how the data management community might contribute to the design of compilers.

Modern database management systems employ sophisticated query optimization techniques that enable the generation of efficient plans for queries over very large data sets. A variety of other applications also process large data sets, but cannot leverage database-style query optimization for their code. We therefore identify an opportunity to enhance an open-source programming language compiler with database-style query optimization. Our system dynamically generates execution plans at query time, and runs those plans on chunks of data at a time. Based on feedback from earlier chunks, alternative plans might be used for later chunks. The compiler extension could be used for a variety of data-intensive applications, allowing all of them to benefit from this class of performance optimizations.

Analytic queries enable sophisticated large-scale data analysis within many commercial, scientific and medical domains today. Data skew is a ubiquitous feature of these real-world domains, but current systems do not make the most of caches for exploiting skew. In particular, a whole cache line may remain cache resident even though only a small part of the cache line corresponds to a popular data item. In this paper, we propose a novel index structure for repositioning data items to concentrate popular items into the same cache lines, resulting in better spatial locality, and better utilization of limited cache resources. We analyze cache behavior, and implement database operators that are efficient in the presence of skew. Experiments on real and synthetic data show that exploiting skew can significantly improve in-memory query performance. In some cases, our techniques can speed up queries by over an order of magnitude.

Modern DNA sequencing technology produces large volumes of genome strings for various biological and medical applications. To mitigate the space overhead required for storing these genome data, previous research has developed compression schemes to save storage resources and to improve the locality for bioinformatics applications. These approaches, however, typically need significant additional processing to support efficient genome string search, an important step for downstream applications in a bioinformatics pipeline. In this paper, we propose to store raw DNA sequence data in a compressed but searchable format, enabling efficient string lookups using database indexes. To build this format, we partition genome strings by computing hash-based minimizers to group overlapping strings together. We carefully optimize our hash function to avoid large buckets caused by repetitive sequences. These buckets are then effectively compressed using local constructed references, and an index is built upon them to guide exact match lookups. Both data compression and string lookups exploit the enhanced locality as a result of the partitioning. We implement storage and search functions over the storage format as a multithreaded library, and perform extensive experiments on real genome sequencing data. The results show that our approach efficiently executes genome string lookups over highly compressed raw read data.

Query execution engines are adapting to the underlying hardware in order to maximize performance. Wider SIMD registers and more complex SIMD instruction sets are emerging in mainstream CPUs as well as new processor designs, such as the many-core platforms that rely on data parallelism via SIMD vectorization to pack a larger number of smaller cores per chip. In the database literature, using SIMD to optimize standalone operators with key--rid pairs is common, yet the state-of-the-art query engines rely on compilation of tightly coupled operators where hand-optimized individual operators become impractical. In this paper, we present VIP, an analytical query engine designed and built bottom-up from pre-compiled column-oriented data-parallel sub-operators and implemented entirely in SIMD. In our evaluation derived from the TPC-H workload, VIP outperforms query-specific hand-optimized scalar code.

Network communication is the slowest component of many operators in distributed parallel databases deployed for large-scale analytics. Whereas considerable work has focused on speeding up databases on modern hardware, communication reduction has received less attention. Existing parallel DBMSs rely on algorithms designed for disks with minor modifications for networks. A more complicated algorithm may burden the CPUs but could avoid redundant transfers of tuples across the network. We introduce track join, a new distributed join algorithm that minimizes network traffic by generating an optimal transfer schedule for each distinct join key. Track join extends the trade-off options between CPU and network. Track join explicitly detects and exploits locality, also allowing for advanced placement of tuples beyond hash partitioning on a single attribute. We propose a novel data placement algorithm based on track join that minimizes the total network cost of multiple joins across different dimensions in an analytical workload. Our evaluation shows that track join outperforms hash join on the most expensive queries of real workloads regarding both network traffic and execution time. Finally, we show that our data placement optimization approach is both robust and effective in minimizing the total network cost of joins in analytical workloads.

Previous database accelerator proposals such as the Q100 provide a fixed set of database operators, chosen to support a target query workload. Some queries may not be well-supported by a fixed accelerator, typically because they need more resources/operators of a particular kind than the accelerator provides. By Amdahl's law, these queries become relatively more expensive as they are not fully accelerated. We propose a second-level accelerator, DB-Mesh, to take up some of this workload. DB-Mesh is an asynchronous systolic array that is more generic than the Q100, and can be configured to run a variety of operators with configurable parameters such as record widths. We demonstrate DB-Mesh applied to nested loops joins, an operator that is not directly supported on the Q100. We show that a naïve implementation has the potential for deadlock, and show how to avoid deadlock with a careful design. We also demonstrate how the data flow policy used in the array influences system throughput.

String processing tasks are common in analytical queries powering business intelligence. Besides substring matching, provided in SQL by the like operator, popular DBMSs also support regular expressions as selective filters. Substring matching can be optimized by using specialized SIMD instructions on mainstream CPUs, reaching the performance of numeric column scans. However, generic regular expressions are harder to evaluate, being dependent on both the DFA size and the irregularity of the input. Here, we optimize matching string columns against regular expressions using SIMD-vectorized code. Our approach avoids accessing the strings in lockstep without branching, to exploit cases when some strings are accepted or rejected early by looking at the first few characters. On common string lengths, our implementation is up to 2X faster than scalar code on a mainstream CPU and up to 5X faster on the Xeon Phi co-processor, improving regular expression support in DBMSs.

The increasing main-memory capacity has allowed query execution to occur primarily in main memory. Database systems employ compression, not only to fit the data in main memory, but also to address the memory bandwidth bottleneck. Lightweight compression schemes focus on efficiency over compression rate and allow query operators to process the data in compressed form. For instance, dictionary compression keeps the distinct column values in a sorted dictionary and stores the values as index codes with the minimum number of bits. Packing the bits of each code contiguously, namely horizontal bit packing, has been optimized by using SIMD instructions for unpacking and by evaluating predicates in parallel per processor word for selection scans. Interleaving the bits of codes, namely vertical bit packing, provides faster scans, but incurs prohibitive costs for packing and unpacking. Here, we improve packing and unpacking for vertical bit packing using SIMD instructions, achieving more than an order of magnitude speedup. Also, we optimize horizontal bit packing on the latest CPUs and compare all approaches. While no single variant is better in all cases, vertical bit packing offers a good trade-off by combining the fastest scans with comparably fast packing and unpacking.

Analytical databases are continuously adapting to the underlying hardware in order to saturate all sources of parallelism. At the same time, hardware evolves in multiple directions to explore different trade-offs. The MIC architecture, one such example, strays from the mainstream CPU design by packing a larger number of simpler cores per chip, relying on SIMD instructions to fill the performance gap. Databases have been attempting to utilize the SIMD capabilities of CPUs. However, mainstream CPUs have only recently adopted wider SIMD registers and more advanced instructions, since they do not rely primarily on SIMD for efficiency. In this paper, we present novel vectorized designs and implementations of database operators, based on advanced SIMD operations, such as gathers and scatters. We study selections, hash tables, and partitioning; and combine them to build sorting and joins. Our evaluation on the MIC-based Xeon Phi co-processor as well as the latest mainstream CPUs shows that our vectorization designs are up to an order of magnitude faster than the state-of-the-art scalar and vector approaches. Also, we highlight the impact of efficient vectorization on the algorithmic design of in-memory database operators, as well as the architectural design and power efficiency of hardware, by making simple cores comparably fast to complex cores. This work is applicable to CPUs and co-processors with advanced SIMD capabilities, using either many simple cores or fewer complex cores.

Analytics are at the core of many business intelligence tasks. Efficient query execution is facilitated by advanced hardware features, such as multi-core parallelism, shared-nothing low-latency caches, and SIMD vector instructions. Only recently, the SIMD capabilities of mainstream hardware have been augmented with wider vectors and non-contiguous loads termed gathers. While analytical DBMSs minimize the use of indexes in favor of scans based on sequential memory accesses, some data structures remain crucial. The Bloom filter, one such example, is the most efficient structure for filtering tuples based on their existence in a set and its performance is critical when joining tables with vastly different cardinalities. We introduce a vectorized implementation for probing Bloom filters based on gathers that eliminates conditional control flow and is independent of the SIMD length. Our techniques are generic and can be reused for accelerating other database operations. Our evaluation indicates a significant performance improvement over scalar code that can exceed 3X when the Bloom filter is cache-resident.

Analytical database systems can achieve high throughput main-memory query execution by being aware of the dynamics of highly-parallel modern hardware. Such systems rely on partitioning to cluster or divide data into smaller pieces and thus achieve better parallelism and memory locality. This paper considers a comprehensive collection of variants of main-memory partitioning tuned for various layers of the memory hierarchy. We revisit the pitfalls of in-cache partitioning, and utilizing the crucial performance factors, we introduce new variants for partitioning out-of-cache. Besides non-in-place variants where linear extra space is used, we introduce large-scale in-place variants, and propose NUMA-aware partitioning that guarantees locality on multiple processors. Also, we make range partitioning comparably fast with hash or radix, by designing a novel cache-resident index to compute ranges. All variants are combined to build three NUMA-aware sorting algorithms: a stable LSB radix-sort; an in-place MSB radix-sort using different variants across memory layers; and a comparison-sort utilizing wide-fanout range partitioning and SIMD-optimal in-cache sorting. To the best of our knowledge, all three are the fastest to date on billion-scale inputs for both dense and sparse key domains. As shown for sorting, our work can serve as a tool for building other operations (e.g., join, aggregation) by combining the most suitable variants that best meet the design goals.

Network communication is the slowest component of many operators in distributed parallel databases deployed for large-scale analytics. Whereas considerable work has focused on speeding up databases on modern hardware, communication reduction has received less attention. Existing parallel DBMSs rely on algorithms designed for disks with minor modifications for networks. A more complicated algorithm may burden the CPUs, but could avoid redundant transfers of tuples across the network. We introduce track join, a novel distributed join algorithm that minimizes network traffic by generating an optimal transfer schedule for each distinct join key. Track join extends the trade-off options between CPU and network. Our evaluation based on real and synthetic data shows that track join adapts to diverse cases and degrees of locality. Considering both network traffic and execution time, even with no locality, track join outperforms hash join on the most expensive queries of real workloads.

In multi-version databases, updates and deletions of records by transactions require appending a new record to tables rather than performing in-place updates. This mechanism incurs non-negligible performance overhead in the presence of multiple indexes on a table, where changes need to be propagated to all indexes. Additionally, an uncommitted record update will block other active transactions from using the index to fetch the most recently committed values for the updated record. In general, in order to support snapshot isolation and/or multi-version concurrency, either each active transaction is forced to search a database temporary area (e.g., roll-back segments) to fetch old values of desired records, or each transaction is forced to scan the entire table to find the older versions of the record in a multi-version database (in the absence of specialized temporal indexes). In this work, we describe a novel kV-Indirection structure to enable efficient (parallelizable) optimistic and pessimistic multi-version concurrency control by utilizing the old versions of records (at most two versions of each record) to provide direct access to the recent changes of records without the need of temporal indexes. As a result, our technique results in higher degree of concurrency by reducing the clashes between readers and writers of data and avoiding extended lock delays. We have a working prototype of our concurrency model and kV-Indirection structure in a commercial database and conducted an extensive evaluation to demonstrate the benefits of our multi-version concurrency control, and we obtained orders of magnitude speed up over the single-version concurrency control.

Heavy hitters are data items that occur at high frequency in a data set. They are among the most important items for an organization to summarize and understand during analytical processing. In data sets with sufficient skew, the number of heavy hitters can be relatively small. We take advantage of this small footprint to compute aggregate functions for the heavy hitters in fast cache memory in a single pass.

Implementations of data processing operators on GPU processors have achieved significant performance improvements over their multicore CPU counterparts. To achieve maximum performance, database operator implementations must take into consideration special features of GPU architectures. A crucial difference is that the unit of execution is a group ("warp") of threads, 32 threads in our target architecture, as opposed to a single thread for CPUs. In the presence of branches, threads in a warp have to follow the same execution path; if some threads diverge then different paths are serialized. Additionally, similarly to CPUs, branches degrade the efficiency of instruction scheduling. Here, we study conjunctive selection queries where branching hurts performance. We compute the optimal execution plan for a conjunctive query, taking branch penalties into account and consider both single-kernel and multi-kernel plans. Our evaluation suggests that divergence affects performance significantly and that our techniques reduce resource underutilization and improve operator performance.

Multiversion databases store both current and historical data. Rows are typically annotated with timestamps representing the period when the row is/was valid. We develop novel techniques for reducing index maintenance in multiversion databases, so that indexes can be used effectively for analytical queries over current data without being a heavy burden on transaction throughput. To achieve this end, we re-design persistent index data structures in the storage hierarchy to employ an extra level of indirection. The indirection level is stored on solid state disks that can support very fast random I/Os, so that traversing the extra level of indirection incurs a relatively small overhead. The extra level of indirection dramatically reduces the number of magnetic disk I/Os that are needed for index updates, and localizes maintenance to indexes on updated attributes. Further, we batch insertions within the indirection layer in order to reduce physical disk I/Os for indexing new records. By reducing the index maintenance overhead on transactions, we enable operational data stores to create more indexes to support queries. We have developed a prototype of our indirection proposal by extending the widely used Generalized Search Tree (GiST) open-source project, which is also employed in PostgreSQL. Our working implementation demonstrates that we can significantly reduce index maintenance and/or query processing cost, by a factor of 3. For insertions of new records, our novel batching technique can save up to 90% of the insertion time.

Implementations of database operators on GPU processors have shown dramatic performance improvement compared to multicore-CPU implementations. GPU threads can cooperate using shared memory, which is organized in interleaved banks and is fast only when threads read and modify addresses belonging to distinct memory banks. Therefore, data processing operators implemented on a GPU, in addition to contention caused by popular values, have to deal with a new performance limiting factor: thread serialization when accessing values belonging to the same bank.

Recent advances in solid state technology have led to the introduction of solid state drives (SSDs). Today's SSDs store data persistently using NAND flash memory and support good random IO performance. Current work in exploiting flash in database systems has primarily focused on using its random IO capability for second level bufferpools below main memory. There has not been much emphasis on exploiting its persistence.

In data-intensive and multi-threaded programming, the performance bottleneck has shifted from I/O bandwidth to main memory bandwidth. The availability, size, and other properties of on-chip cache strongly influence performance. A key question is whether to allow different threads to work independently, or whether to coordinate the shared workload among the threads. The independent approach avoids synchronization overhead, but requires resources proportional to the number of threads and thus is not scalable. On the other hand, the shared method suffers from coordination overhead and potential contention.

Column-oriented DBMSs have gained increasing interest due to their superior performance for analytical workloads. Prior efforts tried to determine the possibility of simulating the query processing techniques of column-oriented systems in row-oriented databases, in a hope to improve their performance, especially for OLAP and data warehousing applications. In this paper, we show that column-oriented query processing can significantly improve the performance of row-oriented DBMSs. We introduce new operators that take into account the unique characteristics of data obtained from indexes, and exploit new technologies such as flash SSDs and multi-core processors to boost the performance. We demonstrate our approach with an experimental study using a prototype built on a commercial row-oriented DBMS.

Life sciences researchers perform scientific literature search as part of their daily activities. Many such searches are executed against PubMed, a central repository of life sciences articles, and often return hundreds, or even thousands, of results, pointing to the need for data exploration tools. In this demonstration we present SkylineSearch, a semantic ranking and result visualization system designed specifically for PubMed, and available to the scientific community at skyline.cs.columbia.edu. Our system leverages semantic annotations of articles with terms from the MeSH controlled vocabulary, and presents results as a two-dimensional skyline, plotting relevance against publication date. We demonstrate that SkylineSearch supports a richer data exploration experience than does the search functionality of PubMed, allowing users to find relevant references more easily. We also show that SkylineSearch executes queries and presents results in interactive time.

Concurrent read-only scans of memory-resident fact tables can form convoys, which generally help performance because cache misses are amortized over several members of the convoy. Nevertheless, we identify two performance hazards for such convoys. One hazard is underutilization of the memory bandwidth because all members of the convoy hit the same cache lines at the same time, rather than reading several different lines concurrently. The other hazard is a form of interference that occurs on the Sun Niagara T1 and T2 machines under certain workloads. We propose solutions to these hazards, including a local shuffle method that reduces interference, preserves the beneficial aspects of convoy behavior, and increases the effective bandwidth by allowing different members of a convoy to concurrently access different cache lines. We provide experimental validation of the methods on several modern architectures.

An ever-increasing amount of data and semantic knowledge in the domain of life sciences is bringing about new data management challenges. In this paper we focus on adding the semantic dimension to literature search, a central task in scientific research. We focus our attention on PubMed, the most significant bibliographic source in life sciences, and explore ways to use high-quality semantic annotations from the MeSH vocabulary to rank search results. We start by developing several families of ranking functions that relate a search query to a document's annotations. We then propose an efficient adaptive ranking mechanism for each of the families. We also describe a two-dimensional Skyline-based visualization that can be used in conjunction with the ranking to further improve the user's interaction with the system, and demonstrate how such Skylines can be computed adaptively and efficiently. Finally, we evaluate the effectiveness of our ranking with a user study.

To take full advantage of the parallelism offered by a multi-core machine, one must write parallel code. Writing parallel code is difficult. Even when one writes correct code, there are numerous performance pitfalls. For example, an unrecognized data hotspot could mean that all threads effectively serialize their access to the hotspot, and throughput is dramatically reduced. Previous work has demonstrated that database operations suffer from such hotspots when naively implemented to run in parallel on a multi-core processor.

High-end solid state disks (SSDs) provide much faster access to data compared to conventional hard disk drives. We present a technique for using solid-state storage as a caching layer between RAM and hard disks in database management systems. By caching data that is accessed frequently, disk I/O is reduced. For random I/O, the potential performance gains are particularly significant. Our system continuously monitors the disk access patterns to identify hot regions of the disk. Temperature statistics are maintained at the granularity of an extent, i.e., 32 pages, and are kept current through an aging mechanism. Unlike prior caching methods, once the SSD is populated with pages from warm regions cold pages are not admitted into the cache, leading to low levels of cache pollution. Simulations based on DB2 I/O traces, and a prototype implementation within DB2 both show substantial performance improvements.

Database processes must be cache-efficient to effectively utilize modern hardware. In this paper, we analyze the importance of temporal locality and the resultant cache behavior in scheduling database operators for in-memory, block oriented query processing. We demonstrate how the overall performance of a workload of multiple database operators is strongly dependent on how they are interleaved with each other. Longer time slices combined with temporal locality within an operator amortize the effects of the initial compulsory cache misses needed to load the operator's state, such as a hash table, into the cache. Though running an operator to completion over all of its input results in the greatest amortization of cache misses, this is typically infeasible because of the large intermediate storage requirement to materialize all input tuples to an operator. We show experimentally that good cache performance can be obtained with smaller buffers whose size is determined at runtime. We demonstrate a low-overhead method of runtime cache miss sampling using hardware performance counters. Our evaluation considers two common database operators with state: aggregation and hash join. Sampling reveals operator temporal locality and cache miss behavior, and we use those characteristics to choose an appropriate input buffer/block size. The calculated buffer size balances cache miss amortization with buffer memory requirements.

Partitioning is an important step in several database algorithms, including sorting, aggregation, and joins. Partitioning is also fundamental for dividing work into equal-sized (or balanced) parallel subtasks. In this paper, we aim to find, materialize and maintain a set of partitioning elements (splitters) for a data set. Unlike traditional partitioning elements, our splitters define both inequality and equality partitions, which allows us to bound the size of the inequality partitions. We provide an algorithm for determining an optimal set of splitters from a sorted data set and show that it has time complexity O(k lg2 N), where k is the number of splitters requested and N is the size of the data set. We show how the algorithm can be extended to pairs of tables, so that joins can be partitioned into work units that have balanced cost. We demonstrate experimentally (a) that finding the optimal set of splitters can be done efficiently, and (b) that using the precomputed splitters can improve the time to sort a data set by up to 76%, with particular benefits in the presence of a few heavy hitters.

In database systems, the cost of data storage and retrieval are important components of the total cost and response time of the system. A popular mechanism to reduce the storage footprint is by compressing the data residing in tables and indexes. Compressing indexes efficiently, while maintaining response time requirements, is known to be challenging. This is especially true when designing for a workload spectrum covering both data warehousing and transaction processing environments. DB2 Linux, UNIX, Windows (LUW) recently introduced index compression for use in both environments. This uses techniques that are able to compress index data efficiently while incurring virtually no performance penalty for query processing. On the contrary, for certain operations, the performance is actually better. In this paper, we detail the design of index compression in DB2 LUW and discuss the challenges that were encountered in meeting the design goals. We also demonstrate its effectiveness by showing performance results on typical customer scenarios.

Solid state disks (SSDs) provide much faster random access to data compared to conventional hard disk drives. Therefore, the response time of a database engine could be improved by moving the objects that are frequently accessed in a random fashion to the SSD. Considering the price and limited storage capacity of solid state disks, the database administrator needs to determine which objects (tables, indexes, materialized views, etc.), if placed on the SSD, would most improve the performance of the system. In this paper we propose a tool called "Object Placement Advisor" for making a wise decision for the object placement problem. By collecting profile inputs from workload runs, the advisor utility provides a list of objects to be placed on the SSD by applying heuristics like the greedy knapsack technique or dynamic programming. To show that the proposed approach is effective in conventional database management systems, we have conducted experiments on IBM DB2 with queries and schemas based on the TPC-H and TPC-C benchmarks. The results indicate that using a relatively small amount of SSD storage, the response time of the system can be reduced significantly by considering the recommendation of the advisor.

Partitioning is a key database task. In this paper we explore partitioning performance on a chip multiprocessor (CMP) that provides a relatively high degree of on-chip thread-level parallelism. It is therefore important to implement the partitioning algorithm to take advantage of the CMP's parallel execution resources. We identify the coordination of writing partition output as the main challenge in a parallel partitioning implementation and evaluate four techniques for enabling parallel partitioning. We confirm previous work in single threaded partitioning that finds L2 cache misses and translation lookaside buffer misses to be important performance issues, but we now add the management of concurrent threads to this analysis.

NAND flash memory is fast becoming popular as a component of large scale storage devices. For workloads requiring many random I/Os, flash devices can provide two orders of magnitude increased performance relative to magnetic disks. Flash memory has some unusual characteristics. In particular, general updates require a page write, while updates of 1 bits to 0 bits can be done in-place. In order to measure how well algorithms perform on such a device, we propose the "EWOM" model for analyzing algorithms on flash memory devices. We introduce flash-aware algorithms for counting, listmanagement, and B-trees, and analyze them using the EWOM model. This analysis shows that one can use the incremental 1-to-0 update properties of flash memory in interesting ways to reduce the required number of page-write operations.

Conceptual complexity is emerging as a new bottleneck as database developers, application developers, and database administrators struggle to design and comprehend large, complex schemas. The simplicity and conciseness of a schema depends critically on the idioms available to express the schema. We propose a formal conceptual schema representation language that combines different design formalisms, and allows schema manipulation that exposes the strengths of each of these formalisms. We demonstrate how the schema factorization framework can be used to generate relational, object-oriented, and faceted physical schemas, allowing a wider exploration of physical schema alternatives than traditional methodologies. We illustrate the potential practical benefits of schema factorization by showing that simple heuristics can significantly reduce the size of a real-world schema description. We also propose the use of schema polynomials to model and derive alternative representations for complex relationships with constraints.

Reading and perceiving complex SQL queries has been a time consuming task in traditional database applications for decades. When it comes to decision support systems with automatically generated and sometimes highly nested SQL queries, human understanding or tuning of these workloads becomes even more challenging. This demonstration explores visualization methods to represent queries as graphs. We developed the QueryScope tool to help visualize and understand critical elements of a query, thereby cutting down the learning curve. We show how the tool allows the user to drill down on particular queries or to find similarly structured queries that may exhibit similar tuning opportunities. The queries shown in the demonstration are taken from real tuning engagements.

Chip multiprocessors (CMPs) present new opportunities for improving database performance on large queries. Because CMPs often share execution, cache, or bandwidth resources among many hardware threads, implementing parallel database operators that efficiently share these resources is key to maximizing performance. A crucial aspect of this parallelism is managing concurrent, shared input and output to the parallel operators. In this paper we propose and evaluate a parallel buffer that enables intra-operator parallelism on CMPs by avoiding contention between hardware threads that need to concurrently read or write to the same buffer. The parallel buffer handles parallel input and output coordination as well as load balancing so individual operators do not need to reimplement that functionality.

Bucketized versions of Cuckoo hashing can achieve 95-99% occupancy, without any space overhead for pointers or other structures. However, such methods typically need to consult multiple hash buckets per probe, and have therefore been seen as having worse probe performance than conventional techniques for large tables. We consider workloads typical of database and stream processing, in which keys and payloads are small, and in which a large number of probes are processed in bulk. We show how to improve probe performance by (a) eliminating branch instructions from the probe code, enabling better scheduling and latency-hiding by modern processors, and (b) using SIMD instructions to process multiple keys/payloads in parallel. We show that on modern architectures, probes to a bucketized Cuckoo hash table can be processed much faster than conventional hash table probes, for both small and large memory-resident tables. On a Pentium 4, a probe is two to four times faster, while on the Cell SPE processor a probe is ten times faster.

A new trend in processor design is increased on-chip support for multithreading in the form of both chip multiprocessors and simultaneous multithreading. Recent research in database systems has begun to explore increased thread-level parallelism made possible by these new multicore and multithreaded processors. The question of how best to use this new technology remains open, particularly as the number of cores per chip and threads per core increase. In this paper we use an existing massively multithreaded architecture, the Cray MTA-2, to explore the implications that a larger degree of on-chip multithreading may have for parallelism in database operations. We find that parallelism in database operations is easy to achieve on the MTA-2 and that, with little effort, parallelism can be made to scale linearly with the number of available processor cores.

As more and more query processing work can be done in main memory access is becoming a significant cost component of database operations. Recent database research has shown that most of the memory stalls are due to second-level cache data misses and first-level instruction cache misses. While a lot of research has focused on reducing the data cache misses, relatively little research has been done on improving the instruction cache performance of database systems.We first answer the question "Why does a database system incur so many instruction cache misses?" We demonstrate that current demand-pull pipelined query execution engines suffer from significant instruction cache thrashing between different operators. We propose techniques to buffer database operations during query execution to avoid instruction cache thrashing. We implement a new light-weight "buffer" operator and study various factors which may affect the cache performance. We also introduce a plan refinement algorithm that considers the query plan and decides whether it is beneficial to add additional "buffer" operators and where to put them. The benefit is mainly from better instruction locality and better hardware branch prediction. Our techniques can be easily integrated into current database systems without significant changes. Our experiments in a memory-resident PostgreSQL database system show that buffering techniques can reduce the number of instruction cache misses by up to 80% and improve query performance by up to 15%.

We consider the fundamental operation of applying a compound filtering condition to a set of records. With large main memories available cheaply, systems may choose to keep the data entirely in main memory, in order to improve query and/or update performance.The design of a data-intensive algorithm in main memory needs to take into account the architectural characteristics of modern processors, just as a disk-based method needs to consider the physical characteristics of disk devices. An important architectural feature that influences the performance of main memory algorithms is the branch misprediction penalty. We demonstrate that branch misprediction has a substantial impact on the performance of an algorithm for applying selection conditions.We describe a space of "query plans" that are logically equivalent, but differ in terms of performance due to variations in their branch prediction behavior. We propose a cost model that takes branch prediction into account, and develop a query optimization algorithm that chooses a plan with optimal estimated cost for conjunctive conditions. We also develop an efficient heuristic optimization algorithm. We also show how records can be ordered to further reduce branch misprediction effects.We provide experimental results for a case study based on an event notification system. Our results show the effectiveness of the proposed optimization techniques. Our results also demonstrate that significant improvements in performance can be obtained by applying a methodology that takes branch misprediction latency into account.

We propose a new storage model called MBSM (multiresolution block storage model) for laying out tables on disks. MBSM is intended to speed up operations such as scans that are typical of data warehouse workloads. Disk blocks are grouped into "super-blocks," with a single record stored in a partitioned fashion among the blocks in a superblock. The intention is that a scan operation that needs to consult only a small number of attributes can access just those blocks of each super-block that contain the desired attributes. To achieve good performance given the physical characteristics of modern disks, we organize super-blocks on the disk into fixed-size "mega-blocks." Within a megablock, blocks of the same type (from various super-blocks) are stored contiguously. We describe the changes needed in a conventional database system to manage tables using such a disk organization. We demonstrate experimentally that MBSM outperforms competing approaches such as NSM (N-ary storage model), DSM (decomposition storage model) and PAX (partition attributes across), for I/O bound decision-support workloads consisting of scans in which not all attributes are required. This improved performance comes at the expense of single-record insert and delete performance; we quantify the trade-offs involved. Unlike DSM, the cost of reconstructing a record from its partitions is small. MBSM stores attributes in a vertically partitioned manner similar to PAX, and thus shares PAX's good CPU cache behavior. We describe methods for mapping attributes to blocks within super-blocks in order to optimize overall performance, and show how to tune the super-block and mega-block sizes.

We consider the fundamental operation of applying a compound filtering condition to a set of records. With large main memories available cheaply, systems may choose to keep the data entirely in main memory, in order to improve query and/or update performance. The design of a data-intensive algorithm in main memory needs to take into account the architectural characteristics of modern processors, just as a disk-based method needs to consider the physical characteristics of disk devices. An important architectural feature that influences the performance of main memory algorithms is the branch misprediction penalty. We demonstrate that branch misprediction has a substantial impact on the performance of an algorithm for applying selection conditions. We describe a space of “query plans ” that are logically equivalent, but differ in terms of performance due to variations in their branch prediction behavior. We propose a cost model that takes branch prediction into account, and develop a query optimization algorithm that chooses a plan with optimal estimated cost for conjunctive conditions. We also develop an efficient heuristic optimization algorithm. We also show how records can be ordered to further reduce branch misprediction effects.

Modern CPUs have instructions that allow basic operations to be performed on several data elements in parallel. These instructions are called SIMD instructions, since they apply a single instruction to multiple data elements. SIMD technology was initially built into commodity processors in order to accelerate the performance of multimedia applications. SIMD instructions provide new opportunities for database engine design and implementation. We study various kinds of operations in a database context, and show how the inner loop of the operations can be accelerated using SIMD instructions. The use of SIMD instructions has two immediate performance benefits: It allows a degree of parallelism, so that many operands can be processed at once. It also often leads to the elimination of conditional branch instructions, reducing branch mispredictions.We consider the most important database operations, including sequential scans, aggregation, index operations, and joins. We present techniques for implementing these using SIMD instructions. We show that there are significant benefits in redesigning traditional query processing algorithms so that they can make better use of SIMD technology. Our study shows that using a SIMD parallelism of four, the CPU time for the new algorithms is from 10% to more than four times less than for the traditional algorithms. Superlinear speedups are obtained as a result of the elimination of branch misprediction effects.

Publish/Subscribe is the paradigm in which users express long-term interests (“subscriptions”) and some agent “publishes” events (e.g., offers). The job of Publish/Subscribe software is to send events to the owners of subscriptions satisfied by those events. For example, a user subscription may consist of an interest in an airplane of a certain type, not to exceed a certain price. A published event may consist of an offer of an airplane with certain properties including price. Each subscription consists of a conjunction of (attribute, comparison operator, value) predicates. A subscription closely resembles a trigger in that it is a long-lived conditional query associated with an action (usually, informing the subscriber). However, it is less general than a trigger so novel data structures and implementations may enable the creation of more scalable, high performance publish/subscribe systems. This paper describes an attempt at the construction of such algorithms and its implementation. Using a combination of data structures, application-specific caching policies, and application-specific query processing our system can handle 600 events per second for a typical workload containing 6 million subscriptions.

Cost-based unbalanced R-trees (CUR-trees) are a cost-function-based data structure for spatial data. CUR-trees are constructed specifically to improve the evaluation of intersection queries, the most basic selection query in an R-tree. A CUR-tree is built taking into account a given query distribution for the queries and a cost model for their execution. Depending on the expected frequency of access, objects or subtrees are stored higher up in the tree. After each insertion in the tree, local reorganizations of a node and its children have their expected query cost evaluated, and a reorganization is performed if this is beneficial. No strict balancing of the trees applies, allowing the tree to unfold solely based on the result of the cost evaluation. We present our cost-based approach and describe the evaluation and reorganization operations based on the cost function. We present a cost model for in-memory access costs and we present three different query models. In our experiments, we compare the performance of the CUR-tree to the R-tree and the R*-tree. The CUR-tree is able to significantly improve intersection query performance, without unacceptably increasing the cost of building the tree. The use of R-trees for in-memory data reflects the high (and growing) cost of bringing data from RAM into the CPU cache relative to the cost of other computations.

Previous research has shown that cache behavior is important for main memory index structures. Cache conscious index structures such as Cache Sensitive Search Trees (CSS-Trees) perform lookups much faster than binary search and T-Trees. However, CSS-Trees are designed for decision support workloads with relatively static data. Although B+-Trees are more cache conscious than binary search and T-Trees, their utilization of a cache line is low since half of the space is used to store child pointers. Nevertheless, for applications that require incremental updates, traditional B+-Trees perform well.

Datacube queries compute aggregates over database relations at a variety of granularities. Often one wants only datacube output tuples whose aggregate value satisfies a certain condition, such as exceeding a given threshold. We develop algorithms for processing a datacube query using the selection condition internally during the computation. Thus, we can safely prune parts of the computation and end up with a more efficient computation of the answer Our first technique, called "specialization", uses the fact that a tuple in the datacube does not meet the given threshold to infer that all finer level aggregates cannot meet the threshold. Our second technique is called "generalization", and applies in the case where the actual value of the aggregate is not needed in the output, but used just to compare with the threshold. We demonstrate the efficiency of these techniques by implementing them within the sparse datacube algorithm of Ross and Srivastava. We present a performance study using synthetic and real-world data sets. Our results indicate substantial performance improvements for queries with selective conditions.

Existing datacube precomputation schemes materialize selected datacube tuples on disk, choosing the most beneficial cuboids (i.e., combinations of dimensions) to materialize given a space limit. However in the context of a data-warehouse receiving frequent "append" updates to the database, the cost of keeping these disk-resident cuboids up-to-date can be high. In this paper we propose a main memory based framework which provides rapid response to queries and requires considerably less maintenance cost than a disk based scheme in an append-only environment. For a given datacube query, we first look among a set of previously materialized tuples for a direct answer. If not found, we use a hash based scheme reminiscent of partial match retrieval to rapidly compute the answer to the query from the finest-level data stored in a special in-memory data structure. Our approach is limited to the important class of applications in which the finest granularity tuples of the datacube fit in main memory. We present analytical and experimental results demonstrating the benefits of our approach.

We propose a new algorithm, called Stripe-join, for performing a join given a join index. Stripe-join is inspired by an algorithm called ‘Jive-join’ developed by Li and Ross. Stripe-join makes a single sequential pass through each input relation, in addition to one pass through the join index and two passes through a set of temporary files that contain tuple identifiers but no input tuples. Stripe-join performs this efficiently even when the input relations are much larger than main memory, as long as the number of blocks in main memory is of the order of the square root of the number of blocks in the participating relations. Stripe-join is particularly efficient for self-joins. To our knowledge, Stripe-join is the first algorithm that, given a join index and a relation significantly larger than main memory, can perform a self-join with just a single pass over the input relation and without storing input tuples in intermediate files. Almost all the I/O is sequential, thus minimizing the impact of seek and rotational latency. The algorithm is resistant to data skew. It can also join multiple relations while still making only a single pass over each input relation. Using a detailed cost model, Stripe-join is analyzed and compared with competing algorithms. For large input relations, Stripe-join performs significantly better than Valduriez's algorithm and hash join algorithms. We demonstrate circumstances under which Stripe-join performs significantly better than Jive-join. Unlike Jive-join, Stripe-join makes no assumptions about the order of the join index.

Correlated queries are very common and important in decision support systems. Traditional nested iteration evaluation methods for such queries can be very time consuming. When they apply, query rewriting techniques have been shown to be much more efficient. But query rewriting is not always possible. When query rewriting does not apply, can we do something better than the traditional nested iteration methods? In this paper, we propose a new invariant technique to evaluate correlated queries efficiently. The basic idea is to recognize the part of the subquery that is not related to the outer references and cache the result of that part after its first execution. Later, we can reuse the result and combine it with the result of the rest of the subquery that is changing for each iteration. Our technique applies to arbitrary correlated subqueries.This paper introduces algorithms to recognize the invariant part of a data flow tree, and to restructure the evaluation plan to reuse the stored intermediate result. We also propose an efficient method to teach an existing join optimizer to understand the invariant feature and thus allow it to be able to generate better join plans in the new context. Some other related optimization techniques are also discussed. The proposed techniques were implemented within three months on an existing real commercial database system.We also experimentally evaluate our proposed technique. Our evaluation indicates that, when query rewriting is not possible, the invariant technique is significantly better than the traditional nested iteration method. Even when query rewriting applies, the invariant technique is sometimes better than the query rewriting technique. Our conclusion is that the invariant technique should be considered as one of the alternatives in evaluating correlated queries since it fills the gap left by rewriting techniques.

We propose a new algorithm, called Stripe-join, for performing a join given a join index. Stripe-join is inspired by an algorithm called "Jive-join" developed by Li and Ross. Stripe-join makes a single sequential pass through each input relation, in addition to one pass through the join index and two passes through a set of temporary files that contain tuple identifiers but no input tuples. Stripe-join performs this efficiently even when the input relations are much larger than main memory, as long as the number of blocks in main memory is of the order of the square root of the number of blocks in the participating relations. Stripe-join is particularly efficient for self-joins. To our knowledge, Stripe-join is the first algorithm that, given a join index and a relation significantly larger than main memory, can perform a selfjoin with just a single pass over the input relation and without storing input tuples in intermediate files. Almost all the I/O is sequential, thus minimizing the...

Materialized views and view maintenance are becoming increasingly important in practice. In order to satisfy different data currency and performance requirements, a number of view maintenance policies have been proposed. Immediate maintenance involves a potential refresh of the view after every update to the deriving tables. When staleness of views can be tolerated, a view may be refreshed periodically or (on-demand) when it is queried. The maintenance policies that are chosen for views have implications on the validity of the results of queries and affect the performance of queries and updates. In this paper, we investigate a number of issues related to supporting multiple views with different maintenance policies.

We investigate the problem of incremental maintenance of an SQL view in the face of database updates, and show that it is possible to reduce the total time cost of view maintenance by materializing (and maintaining) additional views. We formulate the problem of determining the optimal set of additional views to materialize as an optimization problem over the space of possible view sets (which includes the empty set). The optimization problem is harder than query optimization since it has to deal with multiple view sets, updates of multiple relations, and multiple ways of maintaining each view set for each updated relation.We develop a memoing solution for the problem; the solution can be implemented using the expression DAG representation used in rule-based optimizers such as Volcano. We demonstrate that global optimization cannot, in general, be achieved by locally optimizing each materialized subview, because common subexpressions between different materialized subviews can allow nonoptimal local plans to be combined into an optimal global plan. We identify conditions on materialized subviews in the expression DAG when local optimization is possible. Finally, we suggest heuristics that can be used to efficiently determine a useful set of additional views to materialize.Our results are particularly important for the efficient checking of assertions (complex integrity constraints) in the SQL-92 standard, since the incremental checking of such integrity constraints is known to be essentially equivalent to the view maintenance problem.

We consider an optimization technique for deductive and relational databases. The optimization technique is an extension of the magic templates rewriting, and it can improve the performance of query evaluation by not materializing the extension of intermediate views. Standard relational techniques, such as unfolding embedded view definitions, do not apply to recursively defined views, and so alternative techniques are necessary. We demonstrate the correctness of our rewriting. We define a class of “nonrepeating” view definitions, and show that for certain queries our rewriting performs at least as well as magic templates on nonrepeating views, and often much better. A syntactically recognizable property, called “weak right-linearity”, is proposed. Weak right-linearity is a sufficient condition for nonrepetition and is more general than right-linearity. Our technique gives the same benefits as right-linear evaluation of right-linear views, while applying to a significantly more general class of views.

Article Free Access Share on PERF join: an alternative to two-way semijoin and bloomjoin Authors: Zhe Li Department of Computer Science, Columbia University, New York, NY Department of Computer Science, Columbia University, New York, NYView Profile , Kenneth A. Ross Department of Computer Science, Columbia University, New York, NY Department of Computer Science, Columbia University, New York, NYView Profile Authors Info & Claims CIKM '95: Proceedings of the fourth international conference on Information and knowledge managementDecember 1995 Pages 137–144https://doi.org/10.1145/221270.221360Published:02 December 1995Publication History 26citation554DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations26Total Downloads554Last 12 Months45Last 6 weeks5 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF

In previous work we proposed a condition that generalizes local stratification, that ensures a two-valued well-founded model, and that can be syntactically determined from the rules and some monotonicity constraints on the facts in the program.This condition was called "universal constraint stratification." In this paper we generalize the class of constraints from monotonicity constraints to an arbitrary constraint domain.We generalize universal constraint stratification to the more general case, and prove that the condition always ensures a two-valued wellfounded model for finite databases.We also provide an alternative characterization of local stratification using a version of universal constraint stratification with equality constraints.We extend Papadimitriou and Yannakakis' notion of structural totality.Papadimitriou and Yannakakis proved that a program is structurally total if and only if it is stratified.We extend their notion of structural totality so that schema-level constraint information about the variables in the rules is considered part of the "structure."We prove that, for constraints expressed in certain "exact" constraint domains, a program satisfies our extended notion of structural totality if and only if it is universally constraint stratified.

We consider a variant of the view maintenance problem: How does one keep a materialized view up-to-date when the view definition itself changes? Can one do better than recomputing the view from the base relations? Traditional view maintenance tries to maintain the materialized view in response to modifications to the base relations; we try to “adapt ” the view in response to changes in the view definition. Such techniques are needed for applications where the user can change queries dynamically and see the changes in the results fast. Data archaeology, data visualization, and dynamic queries are examples of such applications. We consider all possible redefinitions of SQL SELECT-FROM-UHERE-GROUPBY, UNION, and EXCEPT views, and show how these views can be adapted using the old materialization for the cases where it is possible to do so. We identify extra information that can be kept with a materialization to facilitate redefinition. Multiple simultaneous changes to a view can be handled without necessarily materializing intermediate results. We iden-tify guidelines for users and database administrators that can be used to facilitate efficient view adaptation. 1

We consider a version of the relational model in which relation names may appear as arguments of other relations. Allowing relation names as arguments provides enhanced modelling capabilities, allowing some object-oriented features to be expressed within the relational model. We extend relational algebra with operators for accessing relations, and also define a relational calculus based on the logic HiLog. We prove two equivalence results between extensions of relational algebra provide higher expressive power than relational algebra on any given database. Finally, we argue that the extensions proposed here are relatively easy to provide in practice, and should be expressible within modern query languages.

We propose a semantics for aggregates in deductive databases based on a notion of minimality. Unlike some previous approaches, we form a minimal model of a program component including aggregate operators, rather than insisting that the aggregate apply to atoms that have been fully determined, or that aggregate functions are rewritten in terms of negation. In order to guarantee the existence of such a minimal model we need to insist that the domains over which we are aggregating are complete lattices, and that the program is in a sense monotonic. Our approach generalizes previous approaches based on the well-founded semantics and various forms of stratification. We are also able to handle a large variety of monotonic (or pseudo-monotonic) aggregate functions.

Article Modular acyclicity and tail recursion in logic programs Share on Author: Kenneth A. Ross Stanford University Stanford UniversityView Profile Authors Info & Claims PODS '91: Proceedings of the tenth ACM SIGACT-SIGMOD-SIGART symposium on Principles of database systemsApril 1991 Pages 92–101https://doi.org/10.1145/113413.113422Online:01 April 1991Publication History 14citation260DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations14Total Downloads260Last 12 Months6Last 6 weeks0 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

Article On negation in HiLog (extended abstract) Share on Author: Kenneth A. Ross Stanford University Stanford UniversityView Profile Authors Info & Claims PODS '91: Proceedings of the tenth ACM SIGACT-SIGMOD-SIGART symposium on Principles of database systemsApril 1991 Pages 206–215https://doi.org/10.1145/113413.113432Online:01 April 1991Publication History 3citation176DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations3Total Downloads176Last 12 Months3Last 6 weeks0 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

We propose a class of programs, called modularly stratified programs that have several attractive properties. Modular stratification generalizes stratification and local stratification, while allowing programs that are not expressible by stratified programs. For modularly stratified programs the well-founded semantics coincides with the stable model semantics, and makes every ground literal true or false. Modularly stratified programs are all weakly stratified, but the converse is false. Unlike some weakly stratified programs, modularly stratified programs can be evaluated in a subgoal-at-a-time fashion. We demonstrate a technique for rewriting a modularly stratified program for bottom-up evaluation and extend this rewriting to include magic-set techniques. The rewritten program, when evaluated bottom-up, gives the same answers as the well-founded semantics. We discuss extending modular stratification to other operators such as set-grouping and aggregation that have traditionally been stratified to prevent semantic difficulties.

We introduce global SLS-resolution, a procedural semantics for well-founded negation as defined by Van Gelder, Ross and Schlipf. Global SLS-resolution extends Prsymusinski's SLS-resolution, and may be applied to all programs, whether locally stratified or not.1 Global SLS-resolution is defined in terms of global trees, a new data structure representing the dependence of goals on derived negative subgoals. We prove that global SLS-resolution is sound with respect to the well-founded semantics, and complete for non-floundering queries.

A general logic program (abbreviated to “program” hereafter) is a set of rules that have both positive and negative subgoals. It is common to view a deductive database as a general logic program consisting of rules (IDB) sitting above elementary relations (EDB, facts). It is desirable to associate one Herbrand model with a program and think of that model as the “meaning of the program,” or its “declarative semantics.” Ideally, queries directed to the program would be answered in accordance with this model. We introduce unfounded sets and well-founded partial models, and define the well-founded semantics of a program to be its well-founded partial model. If the well-founded partial model is in fact a model, we call it the well-founded model, and say the program is “well-behaved”. We show that the class of well-behaved programs properly includes previously studied classes of “stratified” and “locally stratified” programs Gelfand and Lifschits have proposed a definition of “unique stable model” for general logic programs. We show that a program has a unique stable model if it has a well-founded model, in which case they are the same. We discuss why the converse is not true.