Building Efficient Query Engines in a High-Level Language

Abstraction without regret refers to the vision of using high-level programming languages for systems development without experiencing a negative impact on performance. A database system designed according to this vision offers both increased productivity and high performance, instead of sacrificing the former for the latter as is the case with existing, monolithic implementations that are hard to maintain and extend. In this article, we realize this vision in the domain of analytical query processing. We present LegoBase, a query engine written in the high-level language Scala. The key technique to regain efficiency is to apply generative programming: LegoBase performs source-to-source compilation and optimizes the entire query engine by converting the high-level Scala code to specialized, low-level C code. We show how generative programming allows to easily implement a wide spectrum of optimizations, such as introducing data partitioning or switching from a row to a column data layout, which are difficult to achieve with existing low-level query compilers that handle only queries. We demonstrate that sufficiently powerful abstractions are essential for dealing with the complexity of the optimization effort, shielding developers from compiler internals and decoupling individual optimizations from each other. We evaluate our approach with the TPC-H benchmark and show that: (a) With all optimizations enabled, LegoBase significantly outperforms a commercial database and an existing query compiler. (b) Programmers need to provide just a few hundred lines of high-level code for implementing the optimizations, instead of complicated low-level code that is required by existing query compilation approaches. (c) The compilation overhead is low compared to the overall execution time, thus making our approach usable in practice for compiling query engines

Generating code for holistic query evaluation

Abstract — We present the application of customized code generation to database query evaluation. The idea is to use a collection of highly efficient code templates and dynamically instantiate them to create query- and hardware-specific source code. The source code is compiled and dynamically linked to the database server for processing. Code generation diminishes the bloat of higher-level programming abstractions necessary for implementing generic, interpreted, SQL query engines. At the same time, the generated code is customized for the hardware it will run on. We term this approach holistic query evaluation. We present the design and development of a prototype system called HIQUE, the Holistic Integrated Query Engine, which incorporates our proposals. We undertake a detailed experimental study of the system’s performance. The results show that HIQUE satisfies its design objectives, while its efficiency surpasses that of both wellestablished and currently-emerging query processing techniques. I

Building Efficient Query Engines in a High-Level Language

In this paper we advocate that it is time for a radical rethinking of database systems design. Developers should be able to leverage high-level programming languages without having to pay a price in efficiency. To realize our vision of abstraction without regret, we present LegoBase, a query engine written in the high-level programming language Scala. The key technique to regain efficiency is to apply generative programming: the Scala code that constitutes the query engine, despite its high-level appearance, is actually a program generator that emits specialized, low-level C code. We show how the combination of high-level and generative programming allows to easily implement a wide spectrum of optimizations that are difficult to achieve with existing low-level query compilers, and how it can continuously optimize the query engine. We evaluate our approach with the TPC-H benchmark and show that: (a) with all optimizations enabled, our architecture significantly outperforms a commercial in-memory database system as well as an existing query compiler, (b) these performance improvements require programming just a few hundred lines of high-level code instead of complicated low-level code that is required by existing query compilers and, finally, that (c) the compilation overhead is low compared to the overall execution time, thus making our approach usable in practice for efficiently compiling query engines

Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data

BigTable是一个分布式存储系统，它可以支持扩展到很大尺寸的数据：PB级别的数据，包含几千个商业服务器。Google的许多项目都存储在BigTable中，包括WEB索引、Google Earth 和Google Finance。这些应用对BigTable提出了截然不同的需求，无论是从数据量（从URL到网页到卫星图像）而言，还是从延迟需求（从后端批量处理到实时数据服务）而言。尽管这些不同的需求，BigTable已经为所有的Google产品提供了一个灵活的、高性能的解决方案。本文中，我们描述了BigTable提供的简单数据模型，它允许客户端对数据部署和格式进行动态控制，我们描述了BigTable的设计和实施

ViewDF: a Flexible Framework for Incremental View Maintenance in Stream Data Warehouses

Because of the increasing data sizes and demands for low latency in modern data analysis, the traditional data warehousing technologies are greatly pushed beyond their limits. Several stream data warehouse (SDW) systems, which are warehouses that ingest append-only data feeds and support frequent refresh cycles, have been proposed including different methods to improve the responsiveness of the systems. Materialized views are critical in large-scale data warehouses due to their ability to speed up queries. Thus an SDW maintains layers of materialized views. Materialized view maintenance in SDW systems introduces new challenges. However, some of the existing SDW systems do not address the maintenance of views while others employ view maintenance techniques that are not efficient. This thesis presents ViewDF, a flexible framework for incremental maintenance of materialized views in SDW systems that generalizes existing techniques and enables new optimizations for views defined with operators that are common in stream analytics. We give a special view definition (ViewDF) to enhance the traditional way of creating views in SQL by being able to reference any partition of any table. We describe a prototype system based on this idea, which allows users to write ViewDFs directly and can automatically translate a broad class of queries into ViewDFs. Several optimizations are proposed and experiments show that our proposed system can improve view maintenance time by a factor of two or more in practical settings.1 yea

Case for holistic query evaluation

In this thesis we present the holistic query evaluation model. We propose a novel query engine design that exploits the characteristics of modern processors when queries execute inside main memory. The holistic model (a) is based on template-based code generation for each executed query, (b) uses multithreading to adapt to multicore processor architectures and (c) addresses the optimization problem of scheduling multiple threads for intra-query parallelism. Main-memory query execution is a usual operation in modern database servers equipped with tens or hundreds of gigabytes of RAM. In such an execution environment, the query engine needs to adapt to the CPU characteristics to boost performance. For this purpose, holistic query evaluation applies customized code generation to database query evaluation. The idea is to use a collection of highly efficient code templates and dynamically instantiate them to create query- and hardware-specific source code. The source code is compiled and dynamically linked to the database server for processing. Code generation diminishes the bloat of higher-level programming abstractions necessary for implementing generic, interpreted, SQL query engines. At the same time, the generated code is customized for the hardware it will run on. The holistic model supports the most frequently used query processing algorithms, namely sorting, partitioning, join evaluation, and aggregation, thus allowing the efficient evaluation of complex DSS or OLAP queries. Modern CPUs follow multicore designs with multiple threads running in parallel. The dataflow of query engine algorithms needs to be adapted to exploit such designs. We identify memory accesses and thread synchronization as the main bottlenecks in a multicore execution environment. We extend the holistic query evaluation model and propose techniques to mitigate the impact of these bottlenecks on multithreaded query evaluation. We analytically model the expected performance and scalability of the proposed algorithms according to the hardware specifications. The analytical performance expressions can be used by the optimizer to statically estimate the speedup of multithreaded query execution. Finally, we examine the problem of thread scheduling in the context of multithreaded query evaluation on multicore CPUs. The search space for possible operator execution schedules scales fast, thus forbidding the use of exhaustive techniques. We model intra-query parallelism on multicore systems and present scheduling heuristics that result in different degrees of schedule quality and optimization cost. We identify cases where each of our proposed algorithms, or combinations of them, are expected to generate schedules of high quality at an acceptable running cost