Jongbaeg Lee  Woon-hak Kang  Sang-won Lee

apache tajo external merge sort sort buffer size fanout

There is a growing requirement for big data processing which extracts valuable information from a large amount of data. The Hadoop system employs the MapReduce framework to process big data. However, MapReduce has limitations such as inflexible and slow data processing. To overcome these drawbacks, SQL query processing techniques known as SQL-on-Hadoop were developed. Apache Tajo, one of the SQL-on-Hadoop techniques, was developed by a Korean development group. External merge sort is one of the heavily used algorithms in Tajo for query processing. The performance of external merge sort in Tajo is influenced by two parameters, sort buffer size and fanout. In this paper, we analyzed the performance of external merge sort in Tajo with various sort buffer sizes and fanouts. In addition, we figured out that there are two major causes of differences in the performance of external merge sort: CPU cache misses which increase as the sort buffer size grows; and the number of merge passes determined by fanout.