Hamming Filter: A Dynamic Signature File Organization for Parallel Stores*

Partitioning, in general, has become the basic strategy for organizing data files to avoid an exhaustive search when executing queries. However, hardware limitations that constrain the performance of query execution mainly become a problem for partial-match queries, where the size of the result can equal the size of the data file. In such situations, a proper application of parallelism can bring the required breakthrough in performance. Hamming Filter is a parallel, part,itionetl organization of signature files that are stored in fixed size buckets with a guaranteed load and is based on the idea of linear code decomposition. It can efficiently manage dynamic data files by means of a partitioned structure that always grows and shrinks linearly and is appropriate to multidimensional partitioning and searching. This paper proves that the organization yields no expected execution skew for partial-match queries, provided the data is not skewed and the degree of parallelism is a power of two.