Technical Perspective: Juggling Functions Inside a Database

Abstract

The paper entitled ”Juggling Functions Inside a Database” gives a brief overview of FAQ, a framework for computational problems expressed as Functional Aggregate Queries. This work falls into my bucket of select database research contributions that go significantly beyond the state of the art along several dimensions. First, it provides an elegant and declarative formalism for a host of ubiquituous computational problems across Computer Science and at the right level of abstraction that exposes structural properties of the problem instances and allows for fine-grained complexity analysis. Second, it is technically deep, proposing an algorithmic solution that achieves lower than or the same complexity as specialized approaches in their respective domain. Third, it is implemented in a commercial database system with scores of real-world applications. Fourth, it is currently applied to in-database analytics and I expect more applications will manifest themselves in the near future. By unifying many problems under the same formalism, FAQ bears the promise of accelerating research: Scalable data management solutions developed by our community for aggregates over joins, e.g., incremental view maintenance, index data structures, or distributed processing, may become generalpurpose solutions for problems outside databases. I will next expand on some of its contributions.