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Evermore, novel and traditional business applications leverage the advantages of a graph data model, such as the offered schema flexibility and an explicit representation of relationships between entities. As a consequence, companies are confronted with the challenge of storing, manipulating, and querying terabytes of graph data for enterprise-critical applications. Although these business applications operate on graph-structured data, they still require direct access to the relational data and typically rely on an RDBMS to keep a single source of truth and access. Existing solutions performing graph operations on business-critical data either use a combination of SQL and application logic or employ a graph data management system. For the first approach, relying solely on SQL results in poor execution performance caused by the functional mismatch between typical graph operations and the relational algebra. To the worse, graph algorithms expose a tremendous variety in structure and functionality caused by their often domain-specific implementations and therefore can be hardly integrated into a database management system other than with custom coding. Since the majority of these enterprise-critical applications exclusively run on relational DBMSs, employing a specialized system for storing and processing graph data is typically not sensible. Besides the maintenance overhead for keeping the systems in sync, combining graph and relational operations is hard to realize as it requires data transfer across system boundaries. A basic ingredient of graph queries and algorithms are traversal operations and are a fundamental component of any database management system that aims at storing, manipulating, and querying graph data. Well-established graph traversal algorithms are standalone implementations relying on optimized data structures. The integration of graph traversals as an operator into a database management system requires a tight integration into the existing database environment and a development of new components, such as a graph topology-aware optimizer and accompanying graph statistics, graph-specific secondary index structures to speedup traversals, and an accompanying graph query language. In this thesis, we introduce and describe GRAPHITE, a hybrid graph-relational data management system. GRAPHITE is a performance-oriented graph data management system as part of an RDBMS allowing to seamlessly combine processing of graph data with relational data in the same system. We propose a columnar storage representation for graph data to leverage the already existing and mature data management and query processing infrastructure of relational database management systems. At the core of GRAPHITE we propose an execution engine solely based on set operations and graph traversals. Our design is driven by the observation that different graph topologies expose different algorithmic requirements to the design of a graph traversal operator. We derive two graph traversal implementations targeting the most common graph topologies and demonstrate how graph-specific statistics can be leveraged to select the optimal physical traversal operator. To accelerate graph traversals, we devise a set of graph-specific, updateable secondary index structures to improve the performance of vertex neighborhood expansion. Finally, we introduce a domain-specific language with an intuitive programming model to extend graph traversals with custom application logic at runtime. We use the LLVM compiler framework to generate efficient code that tightly integrates the user-specified application logic with our highly optimized built-in graph traversal operators. Our experimental evaluation shows that GRAPHITE can outperform native graph management systems by several orders of magnitude while providing all the features of an RDBMS, such as transaction support, backup and recovery, security and user management, effectively providing a promising alternative to specialized graph management systems that lack many of these features and require expensive data replication and maintenance processes.

Evermore, novel and traditional business applications leverage the advantages of a graph data model, such as the offered schema flexibility and an explicit representation of relationships between entities. As a consequence, companies are confronted with the challenge of storing, manipulating, and querying terabytes of graph data for enterprise-critical applications. Although these business applications operate on graph-structured data, they still require direct access to the relational data and typically rely on an RDBMS to keep a single source of truth and access. Existing solutions performing graph operations on business-critical data either use a combination of SQL and application logic or employ a graph data management system. For the first approach, relying solely on SQL results in poor execution performance caused by the functional mismatch between typical graph operations and the relational algebra. To the worse, graph algorithms expose a tremendous variety in structure and functionality caused by their often domain-specific implementations and therefore can be hardly integrated into a database management system other than with custom coding. Since the majority of these enterprise-critical applications exclusively run on relational DBMSs, employing a specialized system for storing and processing graph data is typically not sensible. Besides the maintenance overhead for keeping the systems in sync, combining graph and relational operations is hard to realize as it requires data transfer across system boundaries. A basic ingredient of graph queries and algorithms are traversal operations and are a fundamental component of any database management system that aims at storing, manipulating, and querying graph data. Well-established graph traversal algorithms are standalone implementations relying on optimized data structures. The integration of graph traversals as an operator into a database management system requires a tight integration into the existing database environment and a development of new components, such as a graph topology-aware optimizer and accompanying graph statistics, graph-specific secondary index structures to speedup traversals, and an accompanying graph query language. In this thesis, we introduce and describe GRAPHITE, a hybrid graph-relational data management system. GRAPHITE is a performance-oriented graph data management system as part of an RDBMS allowing to seamlessly combine processing of graph data with relational data in the same system. We propose a columnar storage representation for graph data to leverage the already existing and mature data management and query processing infrastructure of relational database management systems. At the core of GRAPHITE we propose an execution engine solely based on set operations and graph traversals. Our design is driven by the observation that different graph topologies expose different algorithmic requirements to the design of a graph traversal operator. We derive two graph traversal implementations targeting the most common graph topologies and demonstrate how graph-specific statistics can be leveraged to select the optimal physical traversal operator. To accelerate graph traversals, we devise a set of graph-specific, updateable secondary index structures to improve the performance of vertex neighborhood expansion. Finally, we introduce a domain-specific language with an intuitive programming model to extend graph traversals with custom application logic at runtime. We use the LLVM compiler framework to generate efficient code that tightly integrates the user-specified application logic with our highly optimized built-in graph traversal operators. Our experimental evaluation shows that GRAPHITE can outperform native graph management systems by several orders of magnitude while providing all the features of an RDBMS, such as transaction support, backup and recovery, security and user management, effectively providing a promising alternative to specialized graph management systems that lack many of these features and require expensive data replication and maintenance processes.

In-memory column-store database systems are state of the art for the efficient processing of analytical workloads. In these systems, data compression as well as vectorization play an important role. Currently, the vectorized processing is done using regular SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) extensions of modern processors. For example, Intel’s latest SIMD extension supports 512-bit vector registers which allows the parallel processing of 8× 64-bit values. From a database system perspective, this vectorization technique is not only very interesting for compression and decompression to reduce the computational overhead, but also for all database operators like joins, scan, as well as groupings. In contrast to these SIMD extensions, NEC Corporation has recently introduced a novel pure vector engine (supercomputer) as a co-processor called SX-Aurora TSUBASA. This vector engine features a vector length of 16.384 bits with the world’s highest bandwidth of up to 1.2 TB/s, which perfectly fits to data-intensive applications like in-memory database systems. Therefore, we describe the unique architecture and properties of this novel vector engine in this paper. Moreover, we present selected in-memory column-store-specific evaluation results to show the benefits of this vector engine compared to regular SIMD extensions. Finally, we conclude the paper with an outlook on our ongoing research activities in this direction.

The Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) paradigm became a core principle for optimizing query processing in columnar database systems. Until now, only the LOAD/STORE instructions are considered to be efficient enough to achieve the expected speedups, while avoiding GATHER/SCATTER is considered almost imperative. However, the GATHER instruction offers a very flexible way to populate SIMD registers with data elements coming from non-consecutive memory locations. As we will discuss within this article, the GATHER instruction can achieve the same performance as the LOAD instruction, if applied properly. To enable the proper usage, we outline a novel access pattern allowing fine-grained, partition-based SIMD implementations. Then, we apply this partition-based SIMD processing to two representative examples from columnar database systems to experimentally demonstrate the applicability and efficiency of our new access pattern.

The ever-increasing growth of data demands reliable data-base system with high-throughput and low-latency. Main memory-based column store database systems are state-of-the-art on this perspective, whereby data (values) in relational tables are organized by columns rather than by rows. In such systems, a full column scan is a fundamental key operation and thus, the optimization of the key operation is very crucial. This leads to have compact storage layout based fast column scan techniques through intra-value parallelism. For this reason, we investigated on different well-known fast column scan techniques using SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) vectorization as well as using Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA). Moreover, we present selective results of our exhaustive evaluation. Based on this evaluation, we find out the best column scan technique as per implementation mechanism–FPGA and SIMD. Finally, we conclude this paper via mentioning some lessons learned for our ongoing research activities.