Out-of-order execution of database queries

Abstract

Intra-query parallelism is a key for database software to offer acceptable responsiveness for data-intensive queries. Many researchers have studied how to achieve greater execution parallelism for database queries. Partitioning is a representative approach, which divides a query into multiple sub-tasks and executes them in parallel. However, given a new query, optimal division is not necessarily obvious. Database software utilizes heuristic rules or statistical information to decide how to divide the query before execution. As yet another approach to achieve execution parallelism, this paper presents out-of-order database execution (OoODE), a massively-parallel query execution method to offer significant speedup for database queries consistently. OoODE dynamically decomposes query work by making the best use of the exact knowledge of the potential execution parallelism for each operation ready to be performed during query execution. With OoODE, the database software is allowed to automatically squeeze out the execution parallelism that the query inherently holds. Hence, for a wide spectrum of queries, OoODE performs significantly faster than the serial (non-parallelized) execution, while it performs better than or comparably with alternative parallelizing methods without the need for dividing the query before execution. This paper presents the experiments that we conducted using the prototyped database software and demonstrates that OoODE is two to three orders of magnitude faster than the serial execution, whereas it is substantially (up to 2.07 times) faster than the best achievable case of partitioning. Besides, OoODE performs two to four orders of magnitude faster than major DBMSs.