Using Program Analysis to Improve Database Applications

Alvin Cheung, Owen Arden, Samuel Madden, Armando Solar-Lezama, Andrew C. Myers

IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin, March 2014

Abstract

Applications that interact with database management systems (DBMSs) are ubiquitous. Such database applications are usually hosted on an application server and perform many small accesses over the network to a DBMS hosted on the database server to retrieve data for processing. For decades, the database and programming systems research communities have worked on optimizing such applications from different perspectives: database researchers have built highly efficient DBMSs, and programming systems researchers have developed specialized compilers and runtime systems for hosting applications. However, there has been relatively little work that optimizes database applications by considering these specialized systems in combination and looking for optimization opportunities that span across them.

In this article, we highlight three projects that optimize database applications by looking at both the programming system and the DBMS in a holistic manner. By carefully revisiting the interface between the DBMS and the application, and by applying a mix of declarative database optimization and modern program analysis techniques, we show that a speedup of multiple orders of magnitude is possible in real-world applications.

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