BlinkDB: Queries with Bounded Errors and Bounded Response Times on Very Large Data

TL;DR

BlinkDB is an approximate query engine that enables interactive SQL queries on large datasets by trading off accuracy for response time, using adaptive sampling and dynamic sample selection.

Contribution

It introduces a novel adaptive optimization framework and dynamic sampling strategy for efficient approximate querying on massive data.

Findings

Answers queries on 17 TB data in less than 2 seconds

Achieves over 100x speedup compared to Hive

Provides results with 2-10% error bounds

Abstract

In this paper, we present BlinkDB, a massively parallel, sampling-based approximate query engine for running ad-hoc, interactive SQL queries on large volumes of data. The key insight that BlinkDB builds on is that one can often make reasonable decisions in the absence of perfect answers. For example, reliably detecting a malfunctioning server using a distributed collection of system logs does not require analyzing every request processed by the system. Based on this insight, BlinkDB allows one to trade-off query accuracy for response time, enabling interactive queries over massive data by running queries on data samples and presenting results annotated with meaningful error bars. To achieve this, BlinkDB uses two key ideas that differentiate it from previous work in this area: (1) an adaptive optimization framework that builds and maintains a set of multi-dimensional, multi-resolution samples from original data over time, and (2) a dynamic sample selection strategy that selects an appropriately sized sample based on a query's accuracy and/or response time requirements. We have built an open-source version of BlinkDB and validated its effectiveness using the well-known TPC-H benchmark as well as a real-world analytic workload derived from Conviva Inc. Our experiments on a 100 node cluster show that BlinkDB can answer a wide range of queries from a real-world query trace on up to 17 TBs of data in less than 2 seconds (over 100\times faster than Hive), within an error of 2 - 10%.