  Recent excitement in the database community surrounding new
applications?analytic, scientific, graph, geospatial, etc.?has led to an
explosion in research on database storage systems. New storage systems are
vital to the database community, as they are at the heart of making database
systems perform well in new application domains. Unfortunately, each such
system also represents a substantial engineering effort including a great deal
of duplication of mechanisms for features such as transactions and caching. In
this paper, we make the case for RodentStore, an adaptive and declarative
storage system providing a high-level interface for describing the physical
representation of data. Specifically, RodentStore uses a declarative storage
algebra whereby administrators (or database design tools) specify how a logical
schema should be grouped into collections of rows, columns, and/or arrays, and
the order in which those groups should be laid out on disk. We describe the key
operators and types of our algebra, outline the general architecture of
RodentStore, which interprets algebraic expressions to generate a physical
representation of the data, and describe the interface between RodentStore and
other parts of a database system, such as the query optimizer and executor. We
provide a case study of the potential use of RodentStore in representing dense
geospatial data collected from a mobile sensor network, showing the ease with
which different storage layouts can be expressed using some of our algebraic
constructs and the potential performance gains that a RodentStore-built storage
system can offer.
