SPARQLGX: Efficient Distributed Evaluation of SPARQL with Apache Spark

Abstract

sparql is the w3c standard query language for querying data expressed in the Resource Description Framework (rdf). The increasing amounts of rdf data available raise a major need and research interest in building efficient and scalable distributed sparql query evaluators. In this context, we propose sparqlgx: our implementation of a distributed rdf datastore based on Apache Spark. sparqlgx is designed to leverage existing Hadoop infrastructures for evaluating sparql queries. sparqlgx relies on a translation of sparql queries into executable Spark code that adopts evaluation strategies according to (1) the storage method used and (2) statistics on data. We show that sparqlgx makes it possible to evaluate sparql queries on billions of triples distributed across multiple nodes, while providing attractive performance figures. We report on experiments which show how sparqlgx compares to related state-of-the-art implementations and we show that our approach scales better than these systems in terms of supported dataset size. With its simple design, sparqlgx represents an interesting alternative in several scenarios.