Adaptive Schema Databases ∗ William Spothb, Bahareh Sadat Arabi, Eric S. Chano, Dieter Gawlicko, Adel Ghoneimyo, Boris Glavici, Beda Hammerschmidto, Oliver Kennedyb, Seokki Leei, Zhen Hua Liuo, Xing Niui, Ying Yangb b: University at Buffalo i: Illinois Inst. Tech. o: Oracle {wmspoth|okennedy|yyang25}@buffalo.edu {barab|slee195|xniu7}@hawk.iit.edu
[email protected] {eric.s.chan|dieter.gawlick|adel.ghoneimy|beda.hammerschmidt|zhen.liu}@oracle.com ABSTRACT in unstructured or semi-structured form, then an ETL (i.e., The rigid schemas of classical relational databases help users Extract, Transform, and Load) process needs to be designed in specifying queries and inform the storage organization of to translate the input data into relational form. Thus, clas- data. However, the advantages of schemas come at a high sical relational systems require a lot of upfront investment. upfront cost through schema and ETL process design. In This makes them unattractive when upfront costs cannot this work, we propose a new paradigm where the database be amortized, such as in workloads with rapidly evolving system takes a more active role in schema development and data or where individual elements of a schema are queried data integration. We refer to this approach as adaptive infrequently. Furthermore, in settings like data exploration, schema databases (ASDs). An ASD ingests semi-structured schema design simply takes too long to be practical. or unstructured data directly using a pluggable combina- Schema-on-query is an alternative approach popularized tion of extraction and data integration techniques. Over by NoSQL and Big Data systems that avoids the upfront time it discovers and adapts schemas for the ingested data investment in schema design by performing data extraction using information provided by data integration and infor- and integration at query-time.