Integration of Skyline Queries into Spark SQL

Abstract

Skyline queries are frequently used in data analytics and multicriteria decision support applications to filter relevant information from big amounts of data. Apache Spark is a popular framework for processing big, distributed data. The framework even provides a convenient SQL-like interface via the Spark SQL module. However, skyline queries are not natively supported and require tedious rewriting to fit the SQL standard or Spark's SQL-like language. The goal of our work is to fill this gap. We thus provide a full-fledged integration of the skyline operator into Spark SQL. This allows for a simple and easy to use syntax to input skyline queries. Moreover, our empirical results show that this integrated solution by far outperforms a solution based on rewriting into standard SQL.