apache / apache/arrow-rs

[Blog] Split Bloom Filter Folding

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enhancement
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Rust
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Description

**Is your feature request related to a problem or challenge? Please describe what you are trying to do.**
@adriangb implemented a really neat bloom filter sizing optimization in
- https://github.com/apache/arrow-rs/pull/9628

A problem with most Parquet bloom filter implementations is that to avoid wasting a lot of space, you need to know beforehand the Number of Distinct Values (NDV), which is challenging for most systems to configure correctly. This PR very nicely handles the case where the number of distinct values is not known beforehand -- the bloom filter undergoes a folding process.

So if point lookups are important, systems can now enable bloom filters while writing Parquet and the writer will automatically resize the filters to the minimal size needed for a false positive percentage. This technique requires more CPU to compute and fold the bloom filters, but is very effective and results in byte-for-byte identical bloom filters than if the NVD was known beforehand

The high level idea is mentioned in other sources
* Sailhan & Stehr, ["Folding and Unfolding Bloom Filters"](https://hal.science/hal-01126174v1/document), IEEE iThings 2012.
* Liang, ["Blocked Bloom Filters: Speeding Up Point Lookups in Tiger Postgres' Native Columnstore"](https://www.tigerdata.com/blog/blocked-bloom-filters-speeding-up-point-lookups-in-tiger-postgres-native-columnstore)

However, it was not immediately apparently that those techniques do apply to parquet

**Describe the solution you'd like**
If would be great to write a blog post, ideally on one of
* arrow.apache.org (https://github.com/apache/arrow-site) or
* parquet.apache.org (https://github.com/apache/parquet-site)

Explaining how the technique works

The idea would be:
1. Advertise that Parquet bloom filters are more useful now in arrow-rs
2. Explain enough of the implementation that other Parquet implementations could implement it

**Describe alternatives you've considered**

**Additional context**

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

Start by reviewing arrow-rs PR 9628 and the linked Folding and Unfolding Bloom Filters paper to understand the split bloom filter folding technique. Check the arrow-site and parquet-site repositories for the appropriate blog location; done means a published post explaining the optimization and enough implementation detail for other Parquet implementations to reproduce it.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
rust
Domain
documentation
Issue type
Documentation
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Quiet
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
38/100

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