Proteus: A Self-Designing Range Filter
This addresses the need for robust and efficient range filters in database systems, offering a novel self-designing approach that improves performance across varied workloads.
The paper tackles the problem of designing approximate range filters by introducing Proteus, a self-designing filter that configures itself based on sampled data to optimize false positive rates for given space constraints, achieving up to 5.3x performance improvement in RocksDB over state-of-the-art methods.
We introduce Proteus, a novel self-designing approximate range filter, which configures itself based on sampled data in order to optimize its false positive rate (FPR) for a given space requirement. Proteus unifies the probabilistic and deterministic design spaces of state-of-the-art range filters to achieve robust performance across a larger variety of use cases. At the core of Proteus lies our Contextual Prefix FPR (CPFPR) model - a formal framework for the FPR of prefix-based filters across their design spaces. We empirically demonstrate the accuracy of our model and Proteus' ability to optimize over both synthetic workloads and real-world datasets. We further evaluate Proteus in RocksDB and show that it is able to improve end-to-end performance by as much as 5.3x over more brittle state-of-the-art methods such as SuRF and Rosetta. Our experiments also indicate that the cost of modeling is not significant compared to the end-to-end performance gains and that Proteus is robust to workload shifts.