Achieving Communication Efficiency through Push-Pull Partitioning of Semantic Spaces to Disseminate Dynamic Information

Abstract

Many database applications that need to disseminate dynamic information from a server to various clients can suffer from heavy communication costs. Data caching at a client can help mitigate these costs, particularly when individual PUSH-PULL decisions are made for the different semantic regions in the data space. The server is responsible for notifying the client about updates in the PUSH regions. The client needs to contact the server for queries that ask for data in the PULL regions. We call the idea of partitioning the data space into PUSH-PULL regions to minimize communication cost data gerrymandering. In this paper, we present solutions to technical challenges in adopting this simple but powerful idea. We give a provably optimal-cost dynamic programming algorithm for gerrymandering on a single query attribute. We propose a family of efficient heuristics for gerrymandering on multiple query attributes. We handle the dynamic case in which the workloads of queries and updates evolve over time. We validate our methods through extensive experiments on real and synthetic data sets