Charting the design space of query execution using VOILA

Abstract

Database architecture, while having been studied for four decades now, has delivered only a few designs with well-understood properties. These few are followed by most actual systems. Acquiring more knowledge about the design space is a very time-consuming processes that requires manually crafting prototypes with a low chance of generating material insight. We propose a framework that aims to accelerate this exploration process significantly. Our framework enables synthesizing many different engines from a description in a carefully designed domain-specific language (VOILA). We explain basic concepts and formally define the semantics of VOILA. We demonstrate VOILA's flexibility by presenting translation back-ends that allow the synthesis of state-of-the-art paradigms (data-centric compilation, vectorized execution, AVX-512), mutations and mixes thereof. We show-case VOILA's flexibility by exploring the query engine design space in an automated fashion. We generated thousands of query engines and report our findings. Queries generated by VOILA achieve similar performance as state-of-the-art hand-optimized implementations and are up to 35.5X faster than well-known systems.