Sinew

Abstract

As applications are becoming increasingly dynamic, the notion that a schema can be created in advance for an application and remain relatively stable is becoming increasingly unrealistic. This has pushed application developers away from traditional relational database systems and away from the SQL interface, despite their many well-established benefits. Instead, developers often prefer self-describing data models such as JSON, and NoSQL systems designed specifically for their relaxed semantics. In this paper, we discuss the design of a system that enables developers to continue to represent their data using self-describing formats without moving away from SQL and traditional relational database systems. Our system stores arbitrary documents of key-value pairs inside physical and virtual columns of a traditional relational database system, and adds a layer above the database system that automatically provides a dynamic relational view to the user against which fully standard SQL queries can be issued. We demonstrate that our design can achieve an order of magnitude improvement in performance over alternative solutions, including existing relational database JSON extensions, MongoDB, and shredding systems that store flattened key-value data inside a relational database.