Bring Your Language to Your Data with EXASOL

Abstract

User Defined Functions (UDF) are an important feature of analytical SQL as they allow processing of data right inside of relational queries. Typically UDFs have to be written in a special language which sometimes diminishes their practical use, especially when required libraries are not available in this language. An alternative approach is to allow users to provide functions as native low-level database extensions; an approach that can be very dangerous. EXASOL now follows a radically different approach by allowing to integrate any programming language with the database without affecting data integrity: UDF language implementations are encapsulated within Linux containers that communicate with the database engine via a straightforward protocol. Using these technologies, users can now make available their own programming language for UDFs in the database. As an example, we show how to provide C++ as a UDF language for EXASOL.