Recent work on "learned indexes" has revolutionized the way we look at the decades-old field of DBMS indexing. The key idea is that indexes are "models" that predict the position of a key in a dataset. Indexes can, thus, be learned. The original work by Kraska et al. shows surprising results in terms of search performance and space requirements: A learned index beats a B+Tree by a factor of up to three in search time and by an order of magnitude in memory footprint, however it is limited to static, read-only workloads. This paper presents a new class of learned indexes called ALEX which addresses issues that arise when implementing dynamic, updatable learned indexes. Compared to the learned index from Kraska et al., ALEX has up to 3000X lower space requirements, but has up to 2.7X higher search performance on static workloads. Compared to a B+Tree, ALEX achieves up to 3.5X and 3.3X higher performance on static and some dynamic workloads, respectively, with up to 5 orders of magnitude smaller index size. Our detailed experiments show that ALEX presents a key step towards making learned indexes practical for a broader class of database workloads with dynamic updates.
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