Interactive ad-hoc analytics over large datasets has become an increasingly popular use case. We detail the challenges encountered when building a distributed system that allows the interactive exploration of a data cube. We introduce DICE, a distributed system that uses a novel session-oriented model for data cube exploration, designed to provide the user with interactive sub-second latencies for specified accuracy levels. A novel framework is provided that combines three concepts: faceted exploration of data cubes, speculative execution of queries and query execution over subsets of data. We discuss design considerations, implementation details and optimizations of our system. Experiments demonstrate that DICE provides a sub-second interactive cube exploration experience at the billion-tuple scale that is at least 33% faster than current approaches.

The interactive exploration of data cubes has become a popular application, especially over large datasets. In this paper, we present DICE , a combination of a novel frontend query interface and distributed aggregation backend that enables interactive cube exploration. DICE provides a convenient, practical alternative to the typical offline cube materialization strategy by allowing the user to explore facets of the data cube, trading off accuracy for interactive response-times, by sampling the data. We consider the time spent by the user perusing the results of their current query as an opportunity to execute and cache the most likely followup queries. The frontend presents a novel intuitive interface that allows for sampling-aware aggregations, and encourages interaction via our proposed faceted model. The design of our backend is tailored towards the low-latency user interaction at the frontend, and vice-versa. We discuss the synergistic design behind both the frontend user experience and the backend architecture of DICE ; and, present a demonstration that allows the user to fluidly interact with billion-tuple datasets within sub-second interactive response times.