Comparison of LSM indexing techniques for storing spatial data

Abstract In the pre-big data era, many traditional databases supported spatial queries via spatial indexes. However, modern applications are seeing a rapid increase of the volume and ingestion rate of spatial data. Log-structured Merge (LSM) tree is used by many big data systems as their storage str...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Qizhong Mao, Mohiuddin Abdul Qader, Vagelis Hristidis
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: SpringerOpen 2023-04-01
Series:Journal of Big Data
Subjects:
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1186/s40537-023-00734-3
Description
Summary:Abstract In the pre-big data era, many traditional databases supported spatial queries via spatial indexes. However, modern applications are seeing a rapid increase of the volume and ingestion rate of spatial data. Log-structured Merge (LSM) tree is used by many big data systems as their storage structure in order to support write-intensive large-volume workloads, which are usually only optimized for single-dimensional data. Research has studied how spatial indexes can be supported on LSM systems, but focused mainly on the local index organization, that is, how data is organized inside a single LSM component. This paper studies various aspects of LSM spatial indexing, including spatial merge policies, which determine when and how spatial components are merged. Three stack-based and one leveled merge policies have been studied, which have been implemented on a common big data system Apache AsterixDB. The write and read performance on various workloads is evaluated, and our findings and recommendations are discussed. A key finding is that Leveled policies underperform other stack-based merge policies for most types of spatial workloads.
ISSN:2196-1115