PLI: Augmenting Live Databases with Custom Clustered Indexes

RDBMSes only support one clustered index per database table that can speed up query processing. Database applications, that continually ingest large amounts of data, perceive slow query response times to long downtimes, as the clustered index ordering must be strictly maintained. In this paper, we show that application slowdown or downtime, however, can often be avoided if database systems expose the physical location of attributes that are completely or approximately clustered. Towards this, we propose PLI, a physical location index, constructed by determining the physical ordering of an attribute and creating approximately sorted buckets that map physical ordering with attribute values in a live database. To use a PLI incoming SQL queries are simply rewritten with physical ordering information for that particular database. Experiments show queries with the PLI index significantly outperform queries using native unclustered (secondary) indexes, while the index itself requires a much lower maintenance overheads when compared to native clustered indexes.