  Graph partitioning has long been seen as a viable approach to address Graph
DBMS scalability. A partitioning, however, may introduce extra query processing
latency unless it is sensitive to a specific query workload, and optimised to
minimise inter-partition traversals for that workload. Additionally, it should
also be possible to incrementally adjust the partitioning in reaction to
changes in the graph topology, the query workload, or both. Because of their
complexity, current partitioning algorithms fall short of one or both of these
requirements, as they are designed for offline use and as one-off operations.
The TAPER system aims to address both requirements, whilst leveraging existing
partitioning algorithms. TAPER takes any given initial partitioning as a
starting point, and iteratively adjusts it by swapping chosen vertices across
partitions, heuristically reducing the probability of inter-partition
traversals for a given pattern matching queries workload. Iterations are
inexpensive thanks to time and space optimisations in the underlying support
data structures. We evaluate TAPER on two different large test graphs and over
realistic query workloads. Our results indicate that, given a hash-based
partitioning, TAPER reduces the number of inter-partition traversals by around
80%; given an unweighted METIS partitioning, by around 30%. These reductions
are achieved within 8 iterations and with the additional advantage of being
workload-aware and usable online.
