AQUA: Automatic Collaborative Query Processing in Analytical Database

Abstract

Data analysts nowadays are keen to have analytical capabilities involving deep learning (DL). Collaborative queries, which employ relational operations to process structured data and DL models to process unstructured data, provide a powerful facility for DL-based in-database analysis. The classical approach to support collaborative queries in relational databases is to integrate DL models with user-defined functions (UDFs) in a general-purpose language (e.g., C++) to process unstructured data. This approach suffers from suboptimal performance as the opaque UDFs preclude the generation of an optimal query plan. A recent work, DL2SQL, addresses the problem of collaborative query optimization by first converting DL computations into SQL subqueries and then using a classical relational query optimizer to optimize the entire collaborative query. However, the DL2SQL approach compromises usability by requiring data analysts to manually manage DL-related data and tune query performance. To this end, this paper introduces AQUA, an analytical database designed for efficient collaborative query processing. Built on DL2SQL, AQUA automates translations from collaborative queries into SQL queries. To enhance usability, AQUA introduces two techniques: 1) a declarative scheme for DL-related data management, and 2) DL-specific optimizations for collaborative query processing, eliminating the burden of manual data management and performance tuning from the data analysts. We demonstrate the key contributions of AQUA via a web APP that allows the audience to perform collaborative queries on the CIFAR-10 dataset.