Holistic optimization by prefetching query results

Abstract

In this paper we address the problem of optimizing performance of database/web-service backed applications by means of automatically prefetching query results. Prefetching has been performed in earlier work based on predicting query access patterns; however such prediction is often of limited value, and can perform unnecessary prefetches. There has been some earlier work on program analysis and rewriting to automatically insert prefetch requests; however, such work has been restricted to rewriting of single procedures. In many cases, the query is in a procedure which does not offer much scope for prefetching within the procedure; in contrast, our approach can perform prefetching in a calling procedure, even when the actual query is in a called procedure, thereby greatly improving the benefits due to prefetching. Our approach does not perform any intrusive changes to the source code, and places prefetch instructions at the earliest possible points while avoiding wasteful prefetches. We have incorporated our techniques into a tool for holistic optimization called DBridge, to prefetch query results in Java programs that use JDBC. Our tool can be easily extended to handle Hibernate API calls as well as Web service requests. Our experiments on several real world applications demonstrate the applicability and significant performance gains due to our techniques.