TimelyDataflow / TimelyDataflow/differential-dataflow

Implement indices for Traces

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Dominant language
Rust
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Avg merge
10h 42m
Merged PRs (30d)
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Description

The Spine trace implementation is a list of batches, each of which is a key-ordered collection of records. Different batch implementations make it differently easy to leap to the data for a key; the hash implementation lets you use hash values, the ord implementation lets you use binary search. In all cases, you need to independently look through each of the batches.

This design is handy if you would like to clone the list of batches and have an owned cursor through the collected batches.

At the same time, in many situations it is acceptable to borrow the trace reference, do a bounded amount of work, and then release the borrow. In these situations, we could implement and use a single index for each trace, with information for each key of the specific offsets it can be found (or not found) in each of the batches. This dramatically simplifies the cost of key lookups, reducing the amount of hashing and the random probing in memory for sparse updates. Ideally dense updates (many keys) would still result in an in-order traversal of memory, which might not be the case if we just use a HashMap as the index.

This is also where in the previous implementation of differential dataflow we slotted in a specialized index for small integer keys, based on vectors. This made each key lookup especially simple, and the index especially compact.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

The issue does not name files, tests, or entry points. Start by locating the Spine trace and its hash and ord batch implementations, then compare them with the prior differential dataflow index design described here. Done means a trace-level index supports efficient key lookups while preserving an appropriate traversal strategy for dense updates.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
rust
Domain
data-engineering
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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