ALEX

Introduction

ALEX is a new class of learned indexes which addresses issues that arise when implementing dynamic, updatable learned indexes. Compared to the learned index from Kraska et al., ALEX has up to 3000× lower space requirements, but has up to 2.7× higher search performance on static workloads. Compared to a B+Tree, ALEX achieves up to 3.5× and 3.3× higher performance on static and some dynamic workloads, respectively, with up to 5 orders of magnitude smaller index size. Our detailed experiments show that ALEX presents a key step towards making learned indexes practical for a broader class of database workloads with dynamic updates.

Highlight

Publications: SIGMOD 2020 (research)

Collaborators:

MIT: Jialin Ding, Tim Kraska

Microsoft Research: Umar Farooq Minhas, David Lomet, Jae Young Do, Yinan Li, Chi Wang, Badrish Chandramouli, Johannes Gehrke, Donald Kossmann

ETH: Hantian Zhang

Jia Yu
Jia Yu
Co-founder

Jia Yu is a co-founder of Wherobots Inc. and leads its engineering team. Jia is the creator of Apache Sedona and was a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Washington State University from 2020 to 2023. Jia’s research interests include database systems, distributed data systems and geospatial data management.

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