Abstract
Efficient response to search queries is very crucial for data analysts to obtain timely results from big data spanned over heterogeneous machines. Currently, a number of big-data processing frameworks are available in which search operations are performed in distributed and parallel manner. However, implementation of indexing mechanism results in noticeable reduction of overall query processing time. There is an urge to assess the feasibility and impact of indexing towards query execution performance. This paper investigates the performance of state-of-the-art clustered indexing approaches over Hadoop framework which is de facto standard for big data processing. Moreover, this study leverages a comparative analysis of nonclustered indexing overhead in terms of time and space taken by indexing process for varying volume data sets with increasing Index Hit Ratio. Furthermore, the experiments evaluate performance of search operations in terms of data access and retrieval time for queries that use indexes. We then validated the obtained results using Petri net mathematical modeling. We used multiple data sets in our experiments to manifest the impact of growing volume of data on indexing and data search and retrieval performance. The results and highlighted challenges favorably lead researchers towards improved implication of indexing mechanism in perspective of data retrieval from big data. Additionally, this study advocates selection of a non-clustered indexing solution so that optimized search performance over big data is obtained.