An Intermediate Algebra for Optimizing RDF Graph Pattern Matching on MapReduce

Existing MapReduce systems support relational style join operators which translate multi-join query plans into several Map-Reduce cycles. This leads to high I/O and communication costs due to the multiple data transfer steps between map and reduce phases. SPARQL graph pattern matching is dominated by join operations, and is unlikely to be efficiently processed using existing techniques. This cost is prohibitive for RDF graph pattern matching queries which typically involve several join operations. In this paper, we propose an approach for optimizing graph pattern matching by reinterpreting certain join tree structures as grouping operations. This enables a greater degree of parallelism in join processing resulting in more “bushy” like query execution plans with fewer MapReduce cycles. This approach requires that the intermediate results are managed as sets of groups of triples or TripleGroups. We therefore propose a data model and algebra Nested TripleGroup Algebra for capturing and manipulating TripleGroups. The relationship with the traditional relational style algebra used in Apache Pig is discussed. A comparative performance evaluation of the traditional Pig approach and RAPID+ (Pig extended with NTGA) for graph pattern matching queries on the BSBM benchmark dataset is presented. Results show up to 60% performance improvement of our approach over traditional Pig for some