A MapReduce-based scalable discovery and indexing of structured big data

Various methods and techniques have been proposed in past for improving performance of queries on structured and unstructured data. The paper proposes a parallel B-Tree index in the MapReduce framework for improving efficiency of random reads over the existing approaches. The benefit of using the MapReduce framework is that it encapsulates the complexity of implementing parallelism and fault tolerance from users and presents these in a user friendly way. The proposed index reduces the number of data accesses for range queries and thus improves efficiency. The B-Tree index on MapReduce is implemented in a chained-MapReduce process that reduces intermediate data access time between successive map and reduce functions, and improves efficiency. Finally, five performance metrics have been used to validate the performance of proposed index for range search query in MapReduce, such as, varying cluster size and, size of range search query coverage on execution time, the number of map tasks and size of Input/Output (I/O) data. The effect of varying Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) block size and, analysis of the size of heap memory and intermediate data generated during map and reduce functions also shows the superiority of the proposed index. It is observed through experimental results that the parallel B-Tree index along with a chained-MapReduce environment performs better than default non-indexed dataset of the Hadoop and B-Tree like Global Index (Zhao et al., 2012) in MapReduce.