How to Architect a Query Compiler, Revisited

Abstract

To leverage modern hardware platforms to their fullest, more and more database systems embrace compilation of query plans to native code. In the research community, there is an ongoing debate about the best way to architect such query compilers. This is perceived to be a difficult task, requiring techniques fundamentally different from traditional interpreted query execution. We aim to contribute to this discussion by drawing attention to an old but underappreciated idea known as Futamura projections, which fundamentally link interpreters and compilers. Guided by this idea, we demonstrate that efficient query compilation can actually be very simple, using techniques that are no more difficult than writing a query interpreter in a high-level language. Moreover, we demonstrate how intricate compilation patterns that were previously used to justify multiple compiler passes can be realized in one single, straightforward, generation pass. Key examples are injection of specialized index structures, data representation changes such as string dictionaries, and various kinds of code motion to reduce the amount of work on the critical path. We present LB2: a high-level query compiler developed in this style that performs on par with, and sometimes beats, the best compiled query engines on the standard TPC-H benchmark.