Customizable and Scalable Fuzzy Join for Big Data

Fuzzy join is an important primitive for data cleaning. The ability to customize fuzzy join is crucial to allow applications to address domain-specific data quality issues such as synonyms and abbreviations. While efficient indexing techniques exist for single-node implementations of customizable fuzzy join, the state-of-the-art scale-out techniques do not support customization, and exhibit poor performance and scalability characteristics. We describe the design of a scaleout fuzzy join operator that supports customization. We use a locality-sensitive-hashing (LSH) based signature scheme, and introduce optimizations that result in significant speedup with negligible impact on recall. We evaluate our implementation on the Azure Databricks version of Spark using several real-world and synthetic data sets. We observe speedups exceeding 50X compared to the best-known prior scale-out technique, and close to linear scalability with data size and number of nodes.