Identification- and Elimination-Based Parallel Query Processing Techniques for Object-Oriented Databases

Abstract

The newly developed object-oriented database management systems provide rich facilities for the modeling and processing of structural as well as behavioral properties of complex application objects. However, due to their inherent generality, new functionalities to be added to these systems as they continue to evolve, and high performance demand in many application domains, efficient parallel algorithms and architectures would be needed to meet the performance requirement for processing large OODBs. In our previous work, we have shown that processing OODBs can be viewed as the manipulation of patterns of object associations. In this paper, we present several parallel, multiwavefront algorithms based on two approaches, i.e., identification and elimination approaches, to verify association patterns specified in queries. Both approaches allow more processors to operate concurrently on a query than the traditional tree-structured query processing approach, thus introducing a higher degree of parallelism in query processing. We present a graph model to transform the query processing problem into a graph problem. Based on the graph model, proofs of correctness of both approaches for tree-structured queries are given, and a combined approach for solving cyclic queries is also provided. We present a new data structure to represent associations between objects, parallel algorithms based on these approaches, and some evaluation results obtained from an actual implementation of these algorithms on an nCUBE 2 parallel computer.