Reducing cache misses in hash join probing phase by pre-sorting strategy (abstract only)

• Authors: Gi-Hwan Oh;Jae-Myung Kim;Woon-Hak Kang;Sang-Won Lee
• Venue: SIGMOD '12 Proceedings of the 2012 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data
• Year: 2012

Recently, several studies on multi-core cache-aware hash join have been carried out [Kim09VLDB, Blanas11SIGMOD]. In particular, the work of Blanas has shown that rather simple no-partitioning hash join can outperform the work of Kim. Meanwhile, the simple but best performing hash join of Blanas still experiences severe cache misses in probing phase. Because the key values of tuples in outer relation are not sorted or clustered, each outer record has different hashed key value and thus accesses the different hash bucket. Since the size of hash table of inner table is usually much larger than that of the CPU cache, it is highly probable that the reference to hash bucket of inner table by each outer record would encounter cache miss. To reduce the cache misses in hash join probing phase, we propose a new join algorithm, Sorted Probing (in short, SP), which pre-sorts the hashed key values of outer table of hash join so that the access to the hash bucket of inner table has strong temporal locality, thus minimizing the cache misses during the probing phase. As an optimization technique of sorting, we used the cache-aware AlphaSort technique, which extracts the key from each record of data set to be sorted and its pointer, and then sorts the pairs of (key, rec_ptr). For performance evaluation, we used two hash join algorithms from Blanas' work, no partitioning(NP) and independent partitioning(IP) in a standard C++ program, provided by Blanas. Also, we implemented the AlphaSort and added it before each probing phase of NP and IP, and we call each algorithm as NP+SP and IP+SP. For syntactic workload, IP+SP outperforms all other algorithms: IP+SP is faster than other altorithms up to 30%.