BOSS - An Architecture for Database Kernel Composition

Composable Database System Research has yielded components such as Apache Arrow for Storage, Meta's Velox for processing and Apache Calcite for query planning. What is lacking, however, is a design for a general, efficient and easy-to-use architecture to connect them. We propose such an architecture. Our proposal is based on the ideas of partial query evaluation and a carefully designed, unified exchange format for query plans and data. We implement the architecture in a system called BOSS1 that combines the Apache Arrow, the GPU-accelerated compute kernel ArrayFire and the CPU-oriented Velox kernel into a fully-featured relational Data Management System (DMS). We demonstrate that the architecture is general enough to incorporate practically any DMS component, easy-to-use and virtually overhead-free. Based on the architecture, BOSS achieves significant performance improvement over the CPU-only Velox kernel and even outperforms the highly-optimized GPU-only DMS HeavyDB for some queries.