ARENA: Alternative Relational Query Plan Exploration for Database Education

Abstract

A key learning goal of learners taking a database systems course is to understand how SQL queries are processed in an RDBMS in practice. To this end, comprehension of different alternative query plans (AQPs) that may be considered during the selection of the query execution plan (QEP) of a query is paramount. In this demonstration, we present a novel and generic system called ARENA that facilitates exploration of informative alternative query plans of a given SQL query to aid the comprehension of QEP selection. Under the hood, ARENA addresses a novel problem called informative plan selection problem (TIPS) which aims to discover alternative plans from the underlying plan space so that the plan informativeness is maximized. We demonstrate various innovative features of ARENA emphasizing the important role it can play in supplementing database education.