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Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Learning Z-Order Indexes with Dynamic Bit Allocation

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

The Z-order curve is a space-filling curve that maps multi-dimensional data to singledimensional values. Z-order has been used in databases to sort multi-dimensional data. Modern data management systems such as Amazon Redshift and Databricks Delta Lake give users the ability to sort on multiple columns using Z-order. However, the Z-order is difficult to tune, with tunable parameters such as which columns to include in the Z-order. Currently, users must specify the columns for Z-order when using the systems and might not necessarily achieve the best performance, as the choice of columns has a significant impact on performance. Another drawback is that the systems give equal weight to the columns, which often does not result in the best performance due to the unequal impact columns have on query performance. Our work aims to automatically determine the best Z-order configuration for a particular dataset and workload. In this thesis, we introduce learning Z-order indexes using an approach we refer to as dynamic bit allocation, which considers not only which columns to include, but also the weight to put on each column. Our learned Z-order indexes outperform existing techniques by up to 11× in query time and up to 30.2× in rows scanned, revealing the potential of tuning Z-order to improve query performance.

Degree

thesis:*
Name thesis:degree_name
Master
Department dc:contributor.department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Grantor dc:publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Year dc:date.issued
2023

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Gao, Jenny
Advisor dc:contributor.advisor
  • Madden, Samuel

Rights

dc:rights
Statement dc:rights
  • In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
  • Copyright MIT

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Handle dc:identifier.uri
https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/150189
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/150189

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
MIT
Base URL
dspace.mit.edu/oai/request
Last updated
2026-07-22
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
related terms
citation

Gao, Jenny. Learning Z-Order Indexes with Dynamic Bit Allocation. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2023. https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/150189