We describe Shasta, a middleware system built at Google to support interactive reporting in complex user-facing applications related to Google's Internet advertising business. Shasta targets applications with challenging requirements: First, user query latencies must be low. Second, underlying transactional data stores have complex "read-unfriendly" schemas, placing significant transformation logic between stored data and the read-only views that Shasta exposes to its clients. This transformation logic must be expressed in a way that scales to large and agile engineering teams. Finally, Shasta targets applications with strong data freshness requirements, making it challenging to precompute query results using common techniques such as ETL pipelines or materialized views. Instead, online queries must go all the way from primary storage to user-facing views, resulting in complex queries joining 50 or more tables.

Operating system structure is important; it leads to understandable, maintainable, 'pluggable' code. But despite our best efforts, some system elements have been difficult to structure. We propose a new analysis of this problem, and a new technology that can structure these elements. Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) (G. Kiczales et al., 1997) uses linguistic mechanisms to support the separation of crosscutting elements, or aspects of the system, from primary functionality. We have developed a proof-of-concept AOP implementation of prefetching in FreeBSD (www.cs.ubc.ca/labs/spl/aspects/aspectc.html). In our implementation, we have been able to modularize prefetching.

Article Free Access Share on Interlocus: workspace configuration mechanisms for activity awareness Authors: Takahiko Nomura Knowledge Design Initiative Fuji Xerox Co., Ltd., 2-17-22 Aakasaka, Minato-ku, Tokyo, 107-0052, Japan Knowledge Design Initiative Fuji Xerox Co., Ltd., 2-17-22 Aakasaka, Minato-ku, Tokyo, 107-0052, JapanView Profile , Koichi Hayashi Corporate Research Labs., Fuji Xerox Co., Ltd., 430 Sakai, Nakai-machi, Kanagawa 259-0157, Japan Corporate Research Labs., Fuji Xerox Co., Ltd., 430 Sakai, Nakai-machi, Kanagawa 259-0157, JapanView Profile , Tan Hazama Corporate Research Labs., Fuji Xerox Co., Ltd., 430 Sakai, Nakai-machi, Kanagawa 259-0157, Japan Corporate Research Labs., Fuji Xerox Co., Ltd., 430 Sakai, Nakai-machi, Kanagawa 259-0157, JapanView Profile , Stephan Gudmundson Dept. of Computer Science, University of British Columbia, 201-2366 Main Mall, Vancouver, B.C. V6T 1Z4, Canada Dept. of Computer Science, University of British Columbia, 201-2366 Main Mall, Vancouver, B.C. V6T 1Z4, CanadaView Profile Authors Info & Claims CSCW '98: Proceedings of the 1998 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative workNovember 1998 Pages 19–28https://doi.org/10.1145/289444.289453Published:01 November 1998Publication History 35citation704DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations35Total Downloads704Last 12 Months26Last 6 weeks7 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF