Pronto

Nowadays data analytics applications are accessing more and more data from distributed data stores, creating large amount of data traffic on the network. Therefore, distributed analytic queries are prone to suffer from bad performance in terms of query execution time when they encounter a network resource contention, which is quite common in a shared network. Typical distributed query optimizers do not have a way to solve this problem because historically they have been treating the network underneath as a black-box: they are unable to monitor it, let alone to control it. However, we are entering a new era of software-defined networking (SDN), which provides visibility into and control of the network's state for the applications including distributed database systems. In this demonstration, we present a system, called Pronto that leverages the SDN capabilities for a distributed query processor to achieve performance improvement and differentiation for analytical queries. The system is the real implementation of our recently developed methods on commercial SDN products. The demonstration shows the shortcomings of a distributed query optimizer, which treats the underlying network as a black box, and the advantages of the SDN-based approach by allowing the users to selectively explore various relevant and interesting settings in a distributed query processing environment.