Curvature

Curvature is a high performance query engine that integrates lots of advanced techniques, like Vectorization, Morsel-Driven Parallelism, etc. Curvature's execution model are adapted from Duckdb and its Array/Vector model are adapted from Arrow and Velox, which is implemented with the style described in type-exercise-in-urst.

I have been using datafusion for a period of time. It is a high performance query engine based on Arrow. It is great, but I am not satisfied with it. Because:

• Tokio. Tokio is an awesome runtime! But, in my view, it is not suited for OLAP. Firstly, as we all know, linux does not support async io for filesystem(You may say AIO, Linux Torvalds said it is a horrible ad-hoc design). Read the file system asynchronously is achieved by put it in a thread pool, it is pretty inefficient. Io-Uring can solve the problem perfectly. We will use the monoio to implement Curvature and schedule the Task manually.

• Pull based model: Datafusion use the pull based model to execute the query. According to the issue, push based model is more flexible.

• Datafusion will create a lot of tasks and schedule them on the Tokio, these tasks have dependencies but tokio can not be aware of it. Therefore, the tokio will pull them independently and the task, whose children is not ready, will be pending. Other threads whose task queue is empty can steal these tasks. Which means that the execution is not NUMA aware, which may cause lots of cache miss. Using the thread-per-core model and assign the tasks manually could solve this problem. It is the key point of the Morsel-Driven Parallelism

• Arrow

Concepts

• PhysicalPlan: A tree, each node is a PhysicalOperator
• PhysicalOpertor: Operator like Filter, Projection, etc. Note that it is NOT EXECUTABLE. To execute PhysicalOperator, PhysicalOperatorState is needed. It contains the states that each operator should be aware of. For example, the global state for TableScan, such that each parallelism unit(Task) of TableScan can be synchronized.
• Expression: expression used in where condition, select arguments, etc
• ExpressionExecutor: A Expression is not executable, ExpressionExecutor is used to execute it. It will take expression and DataChunk, produce the result to output DataChunk. It consists of ExpressionState that used to keep track of the intermediate states of the execution process.
• Pipeline: A fragment of PhysicalPlan. The PhysicalPlan can be break into multiple fragments call Pipeline via Pipeline Breaker(like HashAggregator, Join, Sort, etc). Pipeline Breaker can not flow the individual DataChunk, it has to collect all of the DataChunks, then It produce DataChunks to other PhysicalOperator. A Pipeline has three roles of PhysicalOperator. A Sink in Child Pipeline is also the Source in Parent Pipeline, which means that a PhysicalOperator can belong to different Pipelines.
  • Source: First operator in the Pipeline, it emit data to result
  • Normal Operator: Internal operator in the Pipeline, consume DataChunk produced by other operator, and produce result.
  • Sink: Last operator in the Pipeline, it only consumes the data, does not produce any result.
• Event: Split the execution into Events, such that Sink's finalize could be only called once. Like union, the sink is shared by different pipeline. If we execute the pipeline with finalize method, the finalize will be called multiple times.

Minimum Support Rust Version(MSRV)

This crate is guaranteed to compile on the latest stable Rust

Contributing

• Code should follow the style.md
• Zero cargo check warning
• Zero cargo clippy warning
• Zero FAILED in cargo test
• Zero FAILED in cargo +nightly miri test especially when you have unsafe functions!

Hardware requirement

Curvature requires the x86-64 CPUs must new than x86-64-v2 microarchitecture. Because we will use sse4.2 by default. And x86_64 CPU should support AES, we will also use it by default