Updating a cracked database

A cracked database is a datastore continuously reorganized based on operations being executed. For each query, the data of interest is physically reclustered to speed-up future access to the same, overlapping or even disjoint data. This way, a cracking DBMS self-organizes and adapts itself to the workload. So far, cracking has been considered for static databases only. In this paper, we introduce several novel algorithms for high-volume insertions, deletions and updates against a cracked database. We show that the nice performance properties of a cracked database can be maintained in a dynamic environment where updates interleave with queries. Our algorithms comply with the cracking philosophy, i.e., a table is informed on pending insertions and deletions, but only when the relevant data is needed for query processing just enough pending update actions are applied. We discuss details of our implementation in the context of an open-source DBMS and we show through a detailed experimental evaluation that our algorithms always manage to keep the cost of querying a cracked datastore with pending updates lower than the non-cracked case.