LSM-Based Storage and Indexing: An Old Idea with Timely Benefits

With the social-media data explosion, near real-time queries, particularly those of a spatio-temporal nature, can be challenging. In this paper, we show how to efficiently answer queries that target recent data within very large data sets. We describe a solution that exploits a natural partitioning property that LSM-based indexes have for components, allowing us to filter out many components when answering queries. Our solution is generalizable to any LSM-based index structure, and can be applied not just on temporal fields (e.g., based on recency), but on any "time-correlated fields" such as Universally Unique Identifiers (UUIDs), user-provided integer ids, etc. We have implemented and experimentally evaluated the solution in the context of the AsterixDB system.