Phoeniq: Failure-tolerant query processing in multi-node environments

Abstract

Parallel processing is a flagship approach for answering analytical queries on large-scale database. As the database scale increases, a larger number of processing nodes are likely to be incorporated to increase the degree of parallelism. However, this solution results in an increased probability of node failure. If such a failure happens during query processing, the processing often has to restart from scratch. This temporal cost may not be acceptable for the user. In this paper, we propose PhoeniQ, a fault-tolerant query processing mechanism for analytical parallel database systems. PhoeniQ takes a package-level checkpoint for every operator pipeline and replicates the output of stateful operators among different processing nodes. If a single processing node fails during processing, another node is enabled to resume the execution state of the failed node, so that the query can continue to run. This paper presents our intensive experiments based on our prototype, which demonstrate that PhoeniQ can continue the query processing in the face of node failures with significantly smaller cost than the conventional approach.