Stylus: a strongly-typed store for serving massive RDF data

AbstractRDF is one of the most commonly used knowledge representation forms. Many highly influential knowledge bases, such as Freebase and PubChemRDF, are in RDF format. An RDF data set is usually represented as a collection of subject-predicate-object triples. Despite the flexibility of RDF triples, it is challenging to serve SPARQL queries on RDF data efficiently by directly managing triples due to the following two reasons. First, heavy joins on a large number of triples are needed for query processing, resulting in a large number of data scans and large redundant intermediate results; Second, weakly-typed triple representation provides suboptimal random access - typically with logarithmic complexity. This data access challenge, unfortunately, cannot be easily met by a better query optimizer as large graph processing is extremely I/O-intensive. In this paper, we argue that strongly-typed graph representation is the key to high-performance RDF query processing. We propose Stylus - a strongly-typed store for serving massive RDF data. Stylus exploits a strongly-typed storage scheme to boost the performance of RDF query processing. The storage scheme is essentially a materialized join view on entities, it thus can eliminate a large number of unnecessary joins on triples. Moreover, it is equipped with a compact representation for intermediate results and an efficient graph-decomposition based query planner. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-life RDF data sets confirm that the proposed approach can dramatically boost the performance of SPARQL query processing.