PhD Seminar - Accelerating Interactive SQL Using Frontend Engines

This talk explores the idea of in-browser interactive analytics with split execution strategies where query operators are distributed between the frontend and backend servers. Our frontend, Afterburner, is an in browser analytical RDBMS in pure JavaScript that runs completely inside a browser with no external dependencies. Given a pointer to a SQL backend and some hints from the user about the next queries, Afterburner splits the queries into two parts: a one time SQL query that runs at the backend and local SQL queries as per the user's interactions. To meet interactive analytics performance requirements Afterburner uses compiled query plans that exploit typed arrays and asm.js, two relatively recent advances in JavaScript to run queries inside the browser at comparable performance to the state of the art running native. We show some interesting findings of how such a setup not only offloads the backend, but also can accelerate data exploration.