Asynchronous view maintenance for VLSD databases

The query models of the recent generation of very large scale distributed (VLSD) shared-nothing data storage systems, including our own PNUTS and others (e.g. BigTable, Dynamo, Cassandra, etc.) are intentionally simple, focusing on simple lookups and scans and trading query expressiveness for massive scale. Indexes and views can expand the query expressiveness of such systems by materializing more complex access paths and query results. In this paper, we examine mechanisms to implement indexes and views in a massive scale distributed database. For web applications, minimizing update latencies is critical, so we advocate deferring the work of maintaining views and indexes as much as possible. We examine the design space, and conclude that two types of view implementations, called remote view tables (RVTs) and local view tables (LVTs), provide a good tradeoff between system throughput and minimizing view staleness. We describe how to construct and maintain such view tables, and how they...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: SIGMOD
• Authors: Parag Agrawal, Adam Silberstein, Brian F. Cooper, Utkarsh Srivastava, Raghu Ramakrishnan
• Keywords: Database, Deferred View Maintenance, SIGMOD 2009, Trading Query Expressiveness, View Tables