Skipping-oriented partitioning for columnar layouts

As data volumes continue to grow, modern database systems increasingly rely on data skipping mechanisms to improve performance by avoiding access to irrelevant data. Recent work [39] proposed a fine-grained partitioning scheme that was shown to improve the opportunities for data skipping in row-oriented systems. Modern analytics and big data systems increasingly adopt columnar storage schemes, and in such systems, a row-based approach misses important opportunities for further improving data skipping. The flexibility of column-oriented organizations, however, comes with the additional cost of tuple reconstruction. In this paper, we develop Generalized Skipping-Oriented Partitioning (GSOP), a novel hybrid data skipping framework that takes into account these row-based and column-based tradeoffs. In contrast to previous column-oriented physical design work, GSOP considers the tradeoffs between horizontal data skipping and vertical partitioning jointly. Our experiments using two public benchmarks and a real-world workload show that GSOP can significantly reduce the amount of data scanned and improve end-to-end query response times over the state-of-the- art techniques.