apache / apache/datafusion

Optimize window function with intra-operator parallelism and vectorization

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#22,355 3 comments 1 reaction 0 assignees View on GitHub
enhancement
Dominant language
Rust
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Merged PRs (30d)
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Description

### Is your feature request related to a problem or challenge?

## Background

For a refresher on window function definitions, see Ch.2 of the following paper:
[https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol8/p1058-leis.pdf](https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol8/p1058-leis.pdf)

Currently, DataFusion has two `ExecutionPlan` implementations for window functions. Both assume that repartitioning and ordering requirements are satisfied outside the window operator itself (the optimizer inserts `RepartitionExec` and `SortExec` on the input side of the window operator). They differ in execution strategy:

* `WindowAggExec`: fallback implementation. It caches the entire input, identifies partition boundaries, then evaluates window partitions one by one.
* `BoundedWindowAggExec`: memory-efficient variant. When the window frame is bounded, it only retains the batches required to evaluate the current window row.

## Pain Points

Both existing implementations only support parallelism through repartitioning. This works well when the window expression includes `PARTITION BY` and the partition cardinality is high enough to utilize all CPU cores.

For queries like:

```sql
-- Only one global partition
SELECT
v1,
avg(v1) OVER (
ORDER BY v1
ROWS BETWEEN 3 PRECEDING AND 3 FOLLOWING
) AS moving_avg
FROM generate_series(1000000000) AS t1(v1);
```

only a single CPU core performs the work.

## Proposed Solution

For the above workload, which uses a simple aggregate function with a fixed `ROWS` window frame, a possible solution would be:

* Introduce intra-operator parallelism: each worker evaluates a separate chunk of rows.
* Improve memory efficiency by incrementally loading input batches.
* Introduce a vectorized aggregate API: evaluate window expression columns in batches so there is no per-row function-call overhead when adjusting frame boundaries.

Image

Here is a PoC targeting the above workload
- https://github.com/apache/datafusion/pull/22356

## Implementation Plan

WIP, I'm still thinking about how to design the common operator state machine and window expr API. Here is the challenge:

Making a single workload fast is relatively straightforward. The hard part is designing a simple, general interface that are extensible for different optimizations.

Here are some different window expr types:

* Window frames such as `ROWS BETWEEN UNBOUNDED PRECEDING AND CURRENT ROW`
* Aggregate functions such as `max(x)`
* Dynamic frame expressions such as `ROWS BETWEEN v1 PRECEDING AND v2 FOLLOWING`

Most of these workloads can support intra-partition parallelism, but the implementation strategy differs significantly. For example, window frames with highly dynamic ranges may benefit from segment-tree-based approaches as described in the paper above.

I'm trying to prototype other workload types to figure out the right design, so that we could easily extend acceleration kernels for window exprs with different characteristics.

### Describe the solution you'd like

_No response_

### Describe alternatives you've considered

_No response_

### Additional context

_No response_

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

Start by reading the existing WindowAggExec and BoundedWindowAggExec implementations, then compare them with the proof of concept in PR #22356 and the referenced window-function paper. The issue is still defining a general operator state machine and window-expression API, so the scope and completion criteria are not yet settled.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

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

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