Combining user interaction, speculative query execution and sampling in the DICE system

The interactive exploration of data cubes has become a popular application, especially over large datasets. In this paper, we present DICE, a combination of a novel frontend query interface and distributed aggregation backend that enables interactive cube exploration. DICE provides a convenient, practical alternative to the typical offline cube materialization strategy by allowing the user to explore facets of the data cube, trading off accuracy for interactive response-times, by sampling the data. We consider the time spent by the user perusing the results of their current query as an opportunity to execute and cache the most likely followup queries. The frontend presents a novel intuitive interface that allows for sampling-aware aggregations, and encourages interaction via our proposed faceted model. The design of our backend is tailored towards the low-latency user interaction at the frontend, and vice-versa. We discuss the synergistic design behind both the frontend user experience and the backend architecture of DICE; and, present a demonstration that allows the user to fluidly interact with billion-tuple datasets within sub-second interactive response times.