Processing theta-joins using MapReduce

  • Authors:

  • Alper Okcan;Mirek Riedewald

  • Affiliations:

  • Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA;Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2011 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of data
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Joins are essential for many data analysis tasks, but are not supported directly by the MapReduce paradigm. While there has been progress on equi-joins, implementation of join algorithms in MapReduce in general is not sufficiently understood. We study the problem of how to map arbitrary join conditions to Map and Reduce functions, i.e., a parallel infrastructure that controls data flow based on key-equality only. Our proposed join model simplifies creation of and reasoning about joins in MapReduce. Using this model, we derive a surprisingly simple randomized algorithm, called 1-Bucket-Theta, for implementing arbitrary joins (theta-joins) in a single MapReduce job. This algorithm only requires minimal statistics (input cardinality) and we provide evidence that for a variety of join problems, it is either close to optimal or the best possible option. For some of the problems where 1-Bucket-Theta is not the best choice, we show how to achieve better performance by exploiting additional input statistics. All algorithms can be made 'memory-aware', and they do not require any modifications to the MapReduce environment. Experiments show the effectiveness of our approach.