Using Containers to Execute SQL Queries in a Cloud

Emergent software container technology is available on any cloud and opens up new opportunities to execute and scale data computationally intensive applications wherever data is located. However, many traditional databases hosted on clouds have not scaled well. In this paper, a framework and methodology to containerize a SQL query is presented, so that, a single SQL query can be scaled and executed by a network of cooperating containers, achieving operator parallelism and other significant performance gains. Experiments of a framework prototype are reported and compared to a real-world database control baseline. Preliminary results on a research cloud shows up to 3-orders of magnitude performance gain compared to running the same query on a single VM hosted baseline control database.