Set Containment Join Revisited

TL;DR

This paper introduces an improved framework for set containment joins that reduces computational cost and memory usage by adaptive prefix tree construction and partitioning, outperforming the state-of-the-art PRETTI algorithm.

Contribution

It presents a novel adaptive and partitioned approach to enhance set containment join efficiency and memory management over existing methods.

Findings

Significant performance improvements over PRETTI.

Reduced memory requirements during join processing.

Effective handling of real and synthetic datasets.

Abstract

Given two collections of set objects $R$ and $S$, the $R \bowtie_{\subseteq} S$ set containment join returns all object pairs $(r, s) \in R \times S$ such that $r \subseteq s$. Besides being a basic operator in all modern data management systems with a wide range of applications, the join can be used to evaluate complex SQL queries based on relational division and as a module of data mining algorithms. The state-of-the-art algorithm for set containment joins (PRETTI) builds an inverted index on the right-hand collection $S$ and a prefix tree on the left-hand collection $R$ that groups set objects with common prefixes and thus, avoids redundant processing. In this paper, we present a framework which improves PRETTI in two directions. First, we limit the prefix tree construction by proposing an adaptive methodology based on a cost model; this way, we can greatly reduce the space and time cost of the join. Second, we partition the objects of each collection based on their first contained item, assuming that the set objects are internally sorted. We show that we can process the partitions and evaluate the join while building the prefix tree and the inverted index progressively. This allows us to significantly reduce not only the join cost, but also the maximum memory requirements during the join. An experimental evaluation using both real and synthetic datasets shows that our framework outperforms PRETTI by a wide margin.