Left Bit Right: For SPARQL Join Queries with OPTIONAL Patterns (Left-outer-joins)

SPARQL basic graph pattern (BGP) (a.k.a. SQL inner-join) query optimization is a well researched area. However, optimization of OPTIONAL pattern queries (a.k.a. SQL left-outer-joins) poses additional challenges, due to the restrictions on the reordering of left-outer-joins. The occurrence of such queries tends to be as high as 50% of the total queries (e.g., DBPedia query logs). In this paper, we present Left Bit Right (LBR), a technique for well-designed nested BGP and OPTIONAL pattern queries. Through LBR, we propose a novel method to represent such queries using a graph of supernodes, which is used to aggressively prune the RDF triples, with the help of compressed indexes. We also propose novel optimization strategies -- first of a kind, to the best of our knowledge -- that combine together the characteristics of acyclicity of queries, minimality, and nullification, best-match operators. In this paper, we focus on OPTIONAL patterns without UNIONs or FILTERs, but we also show how UNIONs and FILTERs can be handled with our technique using a query rewrite. Our evaluation on RDF graphs of up to and over one billion triples, on a commodity laptop with 8 GB memory, shows that LBR can process well-designed low-selectivity complex queries up to 11 times faster compared to the state-of-the-art RDF column-stores as Virtuoso and MonetDB, and for highly selective queries, LBR is at par with them.