Hasso-Plattner-Institut
Prof. Dr. Felix Naumann
 

08.01.2015

Paper accepted at BTW 2015

Research Paper

Scaling out the Discovery of Inclusion Dependencies

Sebastian Kruse, Thorsten Papenbrock, Felix Naumann

Abstract.  Inclusion dependencies are among the most important database dependencies. In addition to their most prominent application – foreign key discovery – inclusion dependencies are an important input to data integration, query optimization, and schema redesign. With their discovery being a recurring data profiling task, previous research has proposed different algorithms to discover all inclusion dependencies within a given dataset. However, none of the proposed algorithms is designed to scale out, i.e., none can be distributed across multiple nodes in a computer cluster to increase the performance. So on large datasets with many inclusion dependencies, these algorithms can take days to complete, even on high-performance computers.

We introduce SINDY, an algorithm that efficiently discovers all unary inclusion dependencies of a given relational dataset in a distributed fashion and that is not tied to main memory requirements. We give a practical implementation of SINDY that builds upon the map-reduce-style framework Stratosphere and conduct several experiments showing that SINDY can process huge datasets by several factors faster than its competitors while scaling with the number of cluster nodes.