Hippo in Action: Scalable Indexing of a Billion New York City Taxi Trips and Beyond

Abstract

The paper demonstrates Hippo a lightweight database indexing scheme that significantly reduces the storage and maintenance overhead without compromising much on the query execution performance. Hippo stores disk page ranges instead of tuple pointers in the indexed table to reduce the storage space occupied by the index. It maintains simplified histograms that represent the data distribution and adopts a page grouping technique that groups contiguous pages into page ranges based on the similarity of their index key attribute distributions. When a query is issued, Hippo leverages the page ranges and histogram-based page summaries to recognize those pages such that their tuples are guaranteed not to satisfy the query predicates and then inspects the remaining pages. We demonstrate Hippo using a billion NYC taxi trip records.