Holistic Approaches for Robustness and Optimization of database applications

Traditional query optimization and compiler optimization techniques have evolved independently over a long time thanks to the extensive research that has been happening in these areas. Though there are still many hard unsolved problems in those areas, we can safely claim that the techniques that have evolved are mature and robust. However, in practice, we see that there is a large class of applications that fall under the category of ‘database applications’ i.e., the applications which operate and maintain the data using a relational database. Now, the optimization of such applications is typically done using the above independent techniques. Clearly, these techniques do not guarantee the global optimal execution of the application. Finding such a global optimum requires a holistic viewpoint of the database application as a single entity. Achieving this goal involves the hard task of bringing together two independent areas of research under one roof. We present a survey of literature in this area and delve into some of the details of promising leads. We then conclude by proposing some directions for future work in this area.