Ranking the big sky: efficient top-k skyline computation on massive data

In many applications, top-k skyline query is an important operation to return k skyline tuples with the highest domination scores in a potentially huge data space. It is analyzed that the existing algorithms cannot process top-k skyline query on massive data efficiently. In this paper, we propose a novel table-scan-based algorithm RSTS to compute top-k skyline results on massive data efficiently. RSTS first builds the presorted table, whose tuples are arranged in the order of round-robin retrieval on sorted column lists. RSTS consists of two phases. In phase 1, the candidate tuples are acquired by the sequential scan on the presorted table. In phase 2, RSTS calculates the domination scores of the candidates and returns query results by another sequential scan. It is proved that RSTS has the characteristic of early termination, along with the theoretical analysis of scan depths. The pruning rule for candidate tuples is devised in this paper. The theoretical pruning effect shows that majority of the skyline results can be discarded directly. The extensive experimental results, conducted on synthetic and real-life data sets, show that RSTS outperforms the existing algorithms significantly.