Unnest is a common operation in Facebook’s daily Presto workload. It converts an ARRAY, MAP, or ROW into a flat relation. Its original implementation used deep copy all the time and was very inefficient. In Unnest Operator Performance Enhancement with Dictionary Blocks, the author improved the Unnest operator by up to 10x in CPU and…
In the previous article we looked at the abstract problem statement and possibilities inherent in scanning tables. In this piece we look at the quantitative upside with Presto. We look at a number of queries and explain the findings. The initial impulse motivating this work is the observation that table scan is by far the…
Table scan, on the face of it, sounds trivial and boring. What’s there in just reading a long bunch of records from first to last? Aren’t indexing and other kinds of physical design more interesting? As data has gotten bigger, the columnar table scan has only gotten more prominent. The columnar scan is a fairly…