Making an RDBMS data scientist friendly

Abstract

We are currently witnessing the rapid evolution and adoption of various data science frameworks that function external to the database. Any support from conventional RDBMS implementations for data science applications has been limited to procedural paradigms such as user-defined functions (UDFs) that lack exploratory programming support. Therefore, the current status quo is that during the exploratory phase, data scientists usually use the database system as the "data storage" layer of the data science framework, whereby the majority of computation and analysis is performed outside the database, e.g., at the client node. We demonstrate AIDA, an in-database framework for data scientists. AIDA allows users to write interactive Python code using a development environment such as a Jupyter notebook. The actual execution itself takes place inside the database (near-data), where a server component of AIDA, that resides inside the embedded Python interpreter of the RDBMS, manages the data sets and computations. The demonstration will also show the visualization capabilities of AIDA where the progress of computation can be observed through live updates. Our evaluations show that AIDA performs several times faster compared to contemporary external data science frameworks, but is much easier to use for exploratory development compared to database UDFs.