In-Browser Interactive SQL Analytics with Afterburner

This demonstration explores the novel and unconventional idea of implementing an analytical RDBMS in pure JavaScript so that it runs completely inside a browser with no external dependencies. Our prototype, called Afterburner, generates compiled query plans that exploit two JavaScript features: typed arrays and asm.js. On the TPC-H benchmark, we show that Afterburner achieves comparable performance to MonetDB running natively on the same machine. This is an interesting finding in that it shows how far JavaScript has come as an efficient execution platform. Beyond a mere technical curiosity, we demonstrate how our techniques can support interactive data exploration by automatically generating materialized views from a backend that is then shipped to the browser to facilitate subsequent interactions seamlessly and efficiently.