Parallel multisource view maintenance

Abstract

In a distributed environment, materialized views are used to integrate data from different information sources and then store them in some centralized location. In order to maintain such materialized views, maintenance queries need to be sent to information sources by the data warehouse management system. Due to the independence of the information sources and the data warehouse, concurrency issues are raised between the maintenance queries and the local update transactions at each information source. Recent solutions such as ECA and Strobe tackle such concurrent maintenance, however with the requirement of quiescence of the information sources. SWEEP and POSSE overcome this limitation by decomposing the global maintenance query into smaller subqueries to be sent to every information source and then performing conflict correction locally at the data warehouse. Note that all these previous approaches handle the data updates one at a time. Hence either some of the information sources or the data warehouse is likely to be idle during most of the maintenance process. In this paper, we propose that a set of updates should be maintained in parallel by several concurrent maintenance processes so that both the information sources as well as the warehouse would be utilized more fully throughout the maintenance process. This parallelism should then improve the overall maintenance performance. For this we have developed a parallel view maintenance algorithm, called PVM, that substantially improves upon the performance of previous maintenance approaches by handling a set of data updates at the same time. The parallel handling of a set of updates is orthogonal to the particular maintenance algorithm applied to the handling of each individual update. In order to perform parallel view maintenance, we have identified two critical issues that must be overcome: (1) detecting maintenance-concurrent data updates in a parallel mode and (2) correcting the problem that the data warehouse commit order may not correspond to the data warehouse update processing order due to parallel maintenance handling. In this work, we provide solutions to both issues. For the former, we insert a middle-layer timestamp assignment module for detecting maintenance-concurrent data updates without requiring any global clock synchronization. For the latter, we introduce the negative counter concept to solve the problem of variant orders of committing effects of data updates to the data warehouse. We provide a proof of the correctness of PVM that guarantees that our strategy indeed generates the correct final data warehouse state. We have implemented both SWEEP and PVM in our EVE data warehousing system. Our performance study demonstrates that a manyfold performance improvement is achieved by PVM over SWEEP.