To understand the complex interactions in modern software, engineers often rely on high-frequency telemetry (HFT) data generated via tools like eBPF. However, today's database systems are too slow for HFT's rate and volume and cannot process HFT within the limited resources available on individual host machines. Mach is a new storage engine for collecting and querying HFT. Key to Mach is the Temporal Skip Log (TSL)---a lightweight, write-optimized, log-based data structure specialized for HFT. Mach supports high ingest rates and makes data immediately queryable while operating within a limited on-host resource envelope. Our demo shows how Mach helps engineers collect and query HFT in near real-time when diagnosing performance problems. In contrast, current systems and data reduction techniques fail to keep up. While a widely used time series database (InfluxDB) drops much of the HFT, the audience will see how Mach loses no data and allows them to interactively explore HFT from application and kernel events as they arrive.

By empowering domain experts to perform interactive exploration of large time series datasets, sketch-based query interfaces have revitalized interest in the well-studied problem of time series similarity search. In this new interaction paradigm, recent similarity algorithms (e.g., Qetch, Peax, LineNet) that attempt to capture perceptually relevant features have supplanted older, more straightforward distance measures (e.g., Euclidean, DTW). However, the downside of these algorithms is the resulting difficulty in designing corresponding index structures to support efficient similarity search over large datasets, thus necessitating brute-force search. This demo will showcase Deep Time Series Similarity Search (DTS3), our pluggable indexing pipeline for arbitrary distance measures. DTS3 can automatically train a foundation model for any custom, user-supplied distance measure with no strict constraints (e.g., differentiability), thus enabling fast retrieval via an off-the-shelf vector DBMS. Using our DeepSketch web interface, participants can compare DTS3 to the baseline brute-force versions of several similarity algorithms to see that our approach can achieve much lower latency without sacrificing accuracy when searching over large, real-world time series datasets.

In recent years, the ever-increasing impact of memory access bottlenecks has brought forth a renewed interest in near-memory processing (NMP) architectures. In this work, we propose and empirically evaluate hybrid data structures, which are concurrent data structures custom-designed for these new NMP architectures. We focus on cache-optimized data structures, such as skiplists and B+ trees, that are often used as index structures in online transaction processing (OLTP) systems to enable fast key-based lookups. These data structures are hierarchical, where lookups begin at a small number of top-level nodes and diverge to many different node paths as they move down the hierarchy, such that nodes in higher levels benefit more from caching. Our proposed hybrid data structures split traditional hierarchical data structures into a host-managed portion consisting of higher-level nodes and an NMP-managed portion consisting of the remaining lower-level nodes, thus retaining and further enhancing the cache-conscious optimizations of their conventional implementations. Although the idea might seem relatively simple, the splitting of the data structure prompts new synchronization problems, and careful implementation is required to ensure high concurrency and correctness. We provide implementations of a hybrid skiplist and a hybrid B+ tree, and we empirically evaluate them on a cycle-accurate full-system architecture simulator. Our results show that the hybrid data structures have the potential to improve performance by more than 2x compared to state-of-the-art concurrent data structures.

Research projects will often use the latest hardware to achieve orders-of-magnitude performance improvements while ignoring the (usually hefty) associated price tag. Real-world deployments typically follow suit, requiring expensive computing infrastructures that cost even more to power and cool.In this paper, we challenge the conventional wisdom that high-end hardware is absolutely necessary for state-of-the-art performance and instead advocate for a radically different approach based on cheap single-board computers (SBCs). While others have previously explored similar ideas for computationally simple and easily partitionable use cases (e.g., key-value stores), so-called "wimpy" nodes have traditionally been rejected as unsuitable for more complex workloads. We believe, however, that recent hardware advancements driven by the mobile computing market call this orthodoxy into question. For example, our microbenchmarks show that one popular SBC, the Raspberry Pi 3B+, offers single-core compute performance that is surprisingly competitive with many server-grade Intel Xeon and ARM-based CPUs at a fraction of the cost and energy consumption.To make our case, we conducted an extensive experimental study, beginning with a series of microbenchmarks to identify the strengths and weaknesses of SBCs relative to server-grade CPUs. Then, to evaluate the ability of SBCs to handle more complex use cases, we analyzed the performance of an in-memory OLAP workload in both single-node and distributed settings. Overall, our results demonstrate up to several orders of magnitude in cost reductions coupled with substantial energy savings when compared to traditional on-premises and cloud deployments, all without a significant increase in absolute runtimes.

In this demo, we present ODLAW, a new tool for retroactive compliance with privacy laws like the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The GDPR enumerates the explicit rights of individuals regarding the use of their personal data, and regulators can impose strict penalties for organizations that fail to comply. While others have advocated for a completely new class of systems to address these regulations, ODLAW takes a different approach by achieving GDPR compliance while allowing an organization to keep its existing data management infrastructure intact. Using a variety of realistic datasets, the demo will show the specific ways that ODLAW can help with GDPR compliance, as well as highlight some of the key challenges that arise in real-world settings.

Code generation for in-memory query processing is now commonplace. While existing approaches use a wide range of techniques (e.g., inline expansion, pipelining, SIMD vectorization, prefetching) to reduce processing effort, we argue that generating code with better data access patterns is often more important. Therefore, we propose SWOLE, the first access-aware code generation strategy. Contradictory to the conventional wisdom, SWOLE heavily leverages predicate pullups to produce code with better access patterns, which outweighs the overhead of performing wasted work. Our experiments show that SWOLE can outperform the state-of-the-art approach by over 2.6×.

With the rapid proliferation of large datasets, efficient data compression has become more important than ever. Columnar compression techniques (e.g., dictionary encoding, run-length encoding, delta encoding) have proved highly effective for tabular data, but they typically compress individual columns without considering potential relationships among columns, such as functional dependencies and correlations. Semantic compression techniques, on the other hand, are designed to leverage such relationships to store only a subset of the columns necessary to infer the others, but existing approaches cannot effectively identify complex relationships across more than a few columns at a time. We propose DeepSqueeze, a novel semantic compression framework that can efficiently capture these complex relationships within tabular data by using autoencoders to map tuples to a lower-dimensional representation. DeepSqueeze also supports guaranteed error bounds for lossy compression of numerical data and works in conjunction with common columnar compression formats. Our experimental evaluation uses real-world datasets to demonstrate that DeepSqueeze can achieve over a 4x size reduction compared to state-of-the-art alternatives.

Natural language is a promising alternative interface to DBMSs because it enables non-technical users to formulate complex questions in a more concise manner than SQL. Recently, deep learning has gained traction for translating natural language to SQL, since similar ideas have been successful in the related domain of machine translation. However, the core problem with existing deep learning approaches is that they require an enormous amount of training data in order to provide accurate translations. This training data is extremely expensive to curate, since it generally requires humans to manually annotate natural language examples with the corresponding SQL queries (or vice versa). Based on these observations, we propose DBPal, a new approach that augments existing deep learning techniques in order to improve the performance of models for natural language to SQL translation. More specifically, we present a novel training pipeline that automatically generates synthetic training data in order to (1) improve overall translation accuracy, (2) increase robustness to linguistic variation, and (3) specialize the model for the target database. As we show, our DBPal training pipeline is able to improve both the accuracy and linguistic robustness of state-of-the-art natural language to SQL translation models.

Visual data exploration tools allow users to quickly gather insights from new datasets. As dataset sizes continue to increase, though, new techniques will be necessary to maintain the interactivity guarantees that these tools require. Approximate query processing (AQP) attempts to tackle this problem and allows systems to return query results at "human speed." However, existing AQP techniques start to break down when confronted with ad hoc queries that target the tails of the distribution. We therefore present an AQP formulation that can provide low-error approximate results at interactive speeds, even for queries over rare subpopulations. In particular, our formulation treats query results as random variables in order to leverage the ample opportunities for result reuse inherent in interactive data exploration. As part of our approach, we apply a variety of optimization techniques that are based on probability theory, including new query rewrite rules and index structures. We implemented these techniques in a prototype system and show that they can achieve interactivity where alternative approaches cannot.

The stated goal for visual data exploration is to operate at a rate that matches the pace of human data analysts, but the ever increasing amount of data has led to a fundamental problem: datasets are often too large to process within interactive time frames. Progressive analytics and visualizations have been proposed as potential solutions to this issue. By processing data incrementally in small chunks, progressive systems provide approximate query answers at interactive speeds that are then refined over time with increasing precision. We study how progressive visualizations affect users in exploratory settings in an experiment where we capture user behavior and knowledge discovery through interaction logs and think-aloud protocols. Our experiment includes three visualization conditions and different simulated dataset sizes. The visualization conditions are: (1) blocking, where results are displayed only after the entire dataset has been processed; (2) instantaneous, a hypothetical condition where results are shown almost immediately; and (3) progressive, where approximate results are displayed quickly and then refined over time. We analyze the data collected in our experiment and observe that users perform equally well with either instantaneous or progressive visualizations in key metrics, such as insight discovery rates and dataset coverage, while blocking visualizations have detrimental effects.

The next generation of high-performance networks with remote direct memory access (RDMA) capabilities requires a fundamental rethinking of the design of distributed in-memory DBMSs. These systems are commonly built under the assumption that the network is the primary bottleneck and should be avoided at all costs, but this assumption no longer holds. For instance, with InfiniBand FDR 4×, the bandwidth available to transfer data across the network is in the same ballpark as the bandwidth of one memory channel. Moreover, RDMA transfer latencies continue to rapidly improve as well. In this paper, we first argue that traditional distributed DBMS architectures cannot take full advantage of high-performance networks and suggest a new architecture to address this problem. Then, we discuss initial results from a prototype implementation of our proposed architecture for OLTP and OLAP, showing remarkable performance improvements over existing designs.

Data analytics has recently grown to include increasingly sophisticated techniques, such as machine learning and advanced statistics. Users frequently express these complex analytics tasks as workflows of user-defined functions (UDFs) that specify each algorithmic step. However, given typical hardware configurations and dataset sizes, the core challenge of complex analytics is no longer sheer data volume but rather the computation itself, and the next generation of analytics frameworks must focus on optimizing for this computation bottleneck. While query compilation has gained widespread popularity as a way to tackle the computation bottleneck for traditional SQL workloads, relatively little work addresses UDF-centric workflows in the domain of complex analytics. In this paper, we describe a novel architecture for automatically compiling workflows of UDFs. We also propose several optimizations that consider properties of the data, UDFs, and hardware together in order to generate different code on a case-by-case basis. To evaluate our approach, we implemented these techniques in T upleware , a new high-performance distributed analytics system, and our benchmarks show performance improvements of up to three orders of magnitude compared to alternative systems.

Machine learning (ML) and advanced statistics are important tools for drawing insights from large datasets. However, these techniques often require human intervention to steer computation towards meaningful results. In this demo, we present V izdom , a new system for interactive analytics through pen and touch. V izdom 's frontend allows users to visually compose complex workflows of ML and statistics operators on an interactive whiteboard, and the back-end leverages recent advances in workflow compilation techniques to run these computations at interactive speeds. Additionally, we are exploring approximation techniques for quickly visualizing partial results that incrementally refine over time. This demo will show V izdom 's capabilities by allowing users to interactively build complex analytics workflows using real-world datasets.