maria-discuss team mailing list archive

[Marko Mäkelä <marko.makela@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Dec 16, 2022 at 3:46 AM Jonathan M. Wilbur
<jonathan@wilbur.space> wrote:
> Sorry to ask this question here, since it is not strictly MariaDB-related, but I need the knowledge of people that develop with databases: is there significant overhead to using a DBMS versus a storage engine directly?

I was thinking about this recently. For some predetermined access
patterns, it might pay off to translate the SQL statements directly
into executable code that would directly access the buffer pool (page
cache) of the storage engine. In terms of InnoDB, the generated code
could work on the level of mini-transactions (atomic access to
multiple buffer pages). The "class handler" interface that
HandlerSocket uses still involves conversions between row formats, for
example.

I did not look into details, but
https://github.com/KowalskiThomas/LLVMSQLite seemed interesting to me.
Of course, we have to keep in mind that SQLite is a much simpler
architecture, maybe not at all suitable for high-concurrency
applications, but it could make sense in the embedded space or in some
read-mostly settings.

In a general purpose database, some just-in-time compilation could
help with more complex queries. It would be a trade-off between memory
management, time to compile, and time to run the compiled vs.
interpreted code path. For a stream of simple arbitrary queries,
interpreting might win.

Best regards,

Marko
-- 
Marko Mäkelä, Lead Developer InnoDB
MariaDB Corporation