Indexing Techniques of Distributed Ordered Tables: A Survey and Analysis

Many NoSQL (Not Only SQL) databases were proposed to store and query on a huge amount of data. Some of them like BigTable, PNUTS, and HBase, can be modeled as distributed ordered tables (DOTs). Many additional indexing techniques have been presented to support queries on non-key columns for DOTs. However, there was no comprehensive analysis or comparison of these techniques, which brings troubles to users in selecting or proposing a proper indexing technique for a certain workload. This paper proposes a taxonomy based on six indexing issues to classify indexing techniques on DOTs and provides a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art techniques. Based on the taxonomy, we propose a performance model named QSModel to estimate the query time and storage cost of these techniques and run experiments on a practical workload from Tencent to evaluate this model. The results show that the maximum error rates of the query time and storage cost are 24.2% and 9.8%, respectively. Furthermore, we propose IndexComparator, an open source project that implements representative indexing techniques. Therefore, users can select the best-fit indexing technique based on both theoretical analysis and practical experiments.