  Cloud-based data analysis is nowadays common practice because of the lower
system management overhead as well as the pay-as-you-go pricing model. The
pricing model, however, is not always suitable for query processing as heavy
use results in high costs. For example, in query-as-a-service systems, where
users are charged per processed byte, collections of queries accessing the same
data frequently can become expensive. The problem is compounded by the limited
options for the user to optimize query execution when using declarative
interfaces such as SQL. In this paper, we show how, without modifying existing
systems and without the involvement of the cloud provider, it is possible to
significantly reduce the overhead, and hence the cost, of query-as-a-service
systems. Our approach is based on query rewriting so that multiple concurrent
queries are combined into a single query. Our experiments show the aggregated
amount of work done by the shared execution is smaller than in a
query-at-a-time approach. Since queries are charged per byte processed, the
cost of executing a group of queries is often the same as executing a single
one of them. As an example, we demonstrate how the shared execution of the
TPC-H benchmark is up to 100x and 16x cheaper in Amazon Athena and Google
BigQuery than using a query-at-a-time approach while achieving a higher
throughput.
