ByteStore: Hybrid Layouts for Main-Memory Column Stores

TL;DR

ByteStore introduces a hybrid column storage system that uses data-aware layouts for different columns, significantly improving performance in main-memory column stores by leveraging data skew and workload-specific layout selection.

Contribution

The paper presents ByteStore, a novel hybrid column store with data-conscious layouts and an adaptive layout advisor, outperforming traditional homogeneous approaches.

Findings

ByteStore achieves up to 5.2X performance improvement.

PP-VBS layout exploits data skew for faster scans.

Adaptive layout selection enhances overall efficiency.

Abstract

The performance of main memory column stores highly depends on the scan and lookup operations on the base column layouts. Existing column-stores adopt a homogeneous column layout, leading to sub-optimal performance on real workloads since different columns possess different data characteristics. In this paper, we propose ByteStore, a column store that uses different storage layouts for different columns. We first present a novel data-conscious column layout, PP-VBS (Prefix-Preserving Variable Byte Slice). PP-VBS exploits data skew to accelerate scans without sacrificing lookup performance. Then, we present an experiment-driven column layout advisor to select individual column layouts for a workload. Extensive experiments on real data show that ByteStore outperforms homogeneous storage engines by up to 5.2X.