BigYAP: Exo-compilation meets UDI

• Type: Article in International Scientific Journal
• Date: 2013

Authors

Vitor Santos Costa (Author) FCUP; David Vaz (Author) Other

Journal

Title: Theory and Practice of Logic Programming

Vol. 13

Pages: 799-813

ISSN: 1471-0684

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Indexing

ISI Web of Knowledge - 2 Citations

Scopus - 2 Citations

Scientific classification

FOS: Natural sciences > Computer and information sciences

Other information

Authenticus ID: P-006-99X

DOI: 10.1017/s1471068413000501

Abstract (EN): The widespread availability of large data-sets poses both an opportunity and a challenge to logic programming. A first approach is to couple a relational database with logic programming, say, a Prolog system with MySQL. While this approach does pay off in cases where the data cannot reside in main memory, it is known to introduce substantial overheads. Ideally, we would like the Prolog system to deal with large data-sets in an efficient way both in terms of memory and of processing time. Just In Time Indexing (JITI) was mainly motivated by this challenge, and can work quite well in many application. Exo-compilation, designed to deal with large tables, is a next step that achieves very interesting results, reducing the memory footprint over two thirds. We show that combining exo-compilation with Just In Time Indexing can have significant advantages both in terms of memory usage and in terms of execution time. An alternative path that is relevant for many applications is User-Defined Indexing (UDI). This allows the use of specialized indexing for specific applications, say the spatial indexing crucial to any spatial system. The UDI sees indexing as pluggable modules, and can naturally be combined with Exo-compilation. We do so by using UDI with exo-data, and incorporating ideas from the UDI into high-performance indexers for specific tasks.

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific

No. of pages: 15