Abstract

As large scale data processing becomes an ever more prominent component of modern computing tasks, databases now exist as a fundamental necessity of most computational platforms. However, in many cases there exists a disparity between the specializations of database management systems and the needs of the applications that run on them. The distinction between transactional and analytical workloads for databases has been well established, but not fully addressed within the space of the most widely used embedded database system, namely SQLite3. To overcome this shortcoming, we implement SQLite3/HE, an analytical database engine implemented as an alternative execution path for SQLite. Through the utilization of an additional, complementary storage layer, SQLite3/HE transforms SQLite into a hybrid database system, able to fully leverage the benefits of both row and columnar storage layouts. SQLite3/HE improves the performance of analytical queries in the 100x-1000x speedup range, at no cost to the existing transactional query performance. These results validate the decision to implement SQLite3/HE as an alternative execution path, enabling it to serve as a drop-in replacement for SQLite3 in existing systems.