Viktor Leis Speaks Out on Concurrency and Parallelism on Multicore CPUs

Welcome to ACM SIGMOD Record's series of interviews with distinguished members of the database community. I'm Marianne Winslett, and today I have here with me Viktor Leis who won the 2018 ACM SIGMOD Jim Gray Dissertation Award for his thesis entitled Query Processing and Optimization in Modern Database Systems. Viktor is now at the University of University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and his Ph.D. is from the Technical University of Munich, where he worked with Thomas Neumann and Alfons Kemper. So, Viktor, welcome.

Crystal

Cloud analytical databases employ a disaggregated storage model, where the elastic compute layer accesses data persisted on remote cloud storage in block-oriented columnar formats. Given the high latency and low bandwidth to remote storage and the limited size of fast local storage, caching data at the compute node is important and has resulted in a renewed interest in caching for analytics. Today, each DBMS builds its own caching solution, usually based on file-or block-level LRU. In this paper, we advocate a new architecture of a smart cache storage system called Crystal , that is co-located with compute. Crystal's clients are DBMS-specific "data sources" with push-down predicates. Similar in spirit to a DBMS, Crystal incorporates query processing and optimization components focusing on efficient caching and serving of single-table hyper-rectangles called regions. Results show that Crystal, with a small DBMS-specific data source connector, can significantly improve query latencies on unmodified Spark and Greenplum while also saving on bandwidth from remote storage.