Demonstration of Smoke: A Deep Breath of Data-Intensive Lineage Applications

Data lineage is a fundamental type of information that describes the relationships between input and output data items in a workflow. As such, an immense amount of data-intensive applications with logic over the input-output relationships can be expressed declaratively in lineage terms. Unfortunately, many applications resort to hand-tuned implementations because either lineage systems are not fast enough to meet their requirements or due to no knowledge of the lineage capabilities. Recently, we introduced a set of implementation design principles and associated techniques to optimize lineage-enabled database engines and realized them in our prototype database engine, namely, Smoke. In this demonstration, we showcase lineage as the building block across a variety of data-intensive applications, including tooltips and details on demand; crossfilter; and data profiling. In addition, we show how Smoke outperforms alternative lineage systems to meet or improve on existing hand-tuned implementations of these applications.