Heuristics-based query optimisation for SPARQL

Query optimization in RDF Stores is a challenging problem as SPARQL queries typically contain many more joins than equivalent relational plans, and hence lead to a large join order search space. In such cases, cost-based query optimization often is not possible. One practical reason for this is that statistics typically are missing in web scale setting such as the Linked Open Datasets (LOD). The more profound reason is that due to the absence of schematic structure in RDF, join-hit ratio estimation requires complicated forms of correlated join statistics; and currently there are no methods to identify the relevant correlations beforehand. For this reason, the use of good heuristics is essential in SPARQL query optimization, even in the case that are partially used with cost-based statistics (i.e., hybrid query optimization). In this paper we describe a set of useful heuristics for SPARQL query optimizers. We present these in the context of a new Heuristic SPARQL Planner (HSP) that is capable of exploiting the syntactic and the structural variations of the triple patterns in a SPARQL query in order to choose an execution plan without the need of any cost model. For this, we define the variable graph and we show a reduction of the SPARQL query optimization problem to the maximum weight independent set problem. We implemented our planner on top of the MonetDB open source column-store and evaluated its effectiveness against the state-of-the-art RDF-3X engine as well as comparing the plan quality with a relational (SQL) equivalent of the benchmarks.