---
abstract: |
    There is a trend towards increased specialization of data management software for performance reasons. In this paper, we study the automatic specialization and optimization of database application programs – sequences of queries and updates, augmented with control flow constructs as they appear in database scripts, UDFs, transactional workloads and triggers in languages such as PL/SQL. We show how to build an optimizing compiler for database application programs using generative programming and state-of-the-art compiler technology.

    We evaluate a hand-optimized low-level implementation of TPC-C, and identify the key optimization techniques that account for its good performance. Our compiler fully automates these optimizations and, applied to this benchmark, outperforms the manually optimized baseline by a factor of two. By selectively disabling some of the optimizations in the compiler, we derive a clinical and precise way of obtaining insight into their individual performance contributions.
author:
- |
    Mohammad Dashti, Sachin Basil John, Thierry Coppey,\
    Amir Shaikhha, Vojin Jovanovic, and Christoph Koch\
    \
    EPFL DATA Lab {firstname}.{lastname}@epfl.ch\
bibliography:
- 'refs.bib'
title: Compiling Database Application Programs
---


