A study on external memory scan-based skyline algorithms

Skyline queries return the set of non-dominated tuples, where a tuple is dominated if there exists another with better values on all attributes. In the past few years the problem has been studied extensively, and a great number of external memory algorithms have been proposed. We thoroughly study the most important scan-based methods, which perform a number of passes over the database in order to extract the skyline. Although these algorithms are specifically designed to operate in external memory, there are many implementation details which are neglected, as well as several design choices resulting in different flavors for these basic methods. We perform an extensive experimental evaluation using real and synthetic data. We conclude that specific design choices can have a significant impact on performance. We also demonstrate that, contrary to common belief, simpler skyline algorithm can be much faster than methods based on pre-processing.