PIQL: A Performance Insightful Query Language For Interactive Applications

Authors:
Armbrust, Michael
Lanham, Nick
Tu, Stephen
Fox, Armando
Franklin, Michael
Patterson, David A.
Technical Report Identifier: EECS-2010-8
January 25, 2010
EECS-2010-8.pdf

Abstract: Large-scale, user-facing applications are increasingly moving from relational databases to distributed key-value stores for high request rate, low latency workloads. Often this move is motivated not only by key/value stores' ability to scale simply by adding more hardware, but also by the easy to understand predictable performance they provide for all operations. For complex queries this approach often requires onerous explicit index management and imperative data lookup by the developer. We propose PIQL, a Performance Insightful Query Language that allows developers to express many of the queries found on these websites, while still providing strict performance guarantees.