Rethinking the application-database interface

Applications that interact with database management systems (DBMSs) are ubiquitous in our daily lives. Such database applications are usually hosted on an application server and perform many small accesses over the network to a DBMS hosted on a 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 relative little work that examines the interface between these two software layers to improve application performance. In this thesis, I show how making use of application semantics and optimizing across these layers of the software stack can help us improve the performance of database applications. In particular, I describe three projects that optimize database applications by looking at both the programming system and the DBMS in tandem. By carefully revisiting the interface between the DBMS and the application, and by applying a mix of declarative database optimization and modern program analysis and synthesis techniques, we show that multiple orders of magnitude speedups are possible in real-world applications. I conclude by highlighting future work in the area, and propose a vision towards automatically generating application-specific data stores.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2015

Author dc:creator

• Cheung, Alvin K

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/101565

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/101565