A Combined Semi-pipelined Query Processing Architecture for Distributed Full-Text Retrieval

Abstract

Term-partitioning is an efficient way to distribute a large inverted index. Two fundamentally different query processing approaches are pipelined and non-pipelined. While the pipelined approach provides higher query throughput, the non-pipelined approach provides shorter query latency. In this work we propose a third alternative, combining non-pipelined inverted index access, heuristic decision between pipelined and non-pipelined query execution and an improved query routing strategy. From our results, the method combines the advantages of both approaches and provides high throughput and short query latency. Our method increases the throughput by up to 26% compared to the non-pipelined approach and reduces the latency by up to 32% compared to the pipelined.