Interactive SQL analytics in your browser!
The advent of online notebooks and complex browser-based interactive visualizations means that the browser has, in essence, become the "shell". However, in all implementations that we are aware of, the browser is simply a dumb rendering endpoint. However, modern browsers are capable of so much more: they embed powerful JavaScript engines capable of supporting real-time collaborative tools, driving online multi-player games, rendering impressive 3D scenes, and even running first-person shooters.
We asked ourselves: Is it possible to exploit modern JavaScript engines and build a high-performance analytics database that runs completely in the browser? Our answer is Afterburner, a prototype analytical RDBMS implemented in JavaScript that executes completely inside a web browser, is standards compliant, and has no external dependencies. Afterburner generates compiled query plans that exploit two JavaScript features: typed arrays and asm.js.
How fast is Afterburner? Based on a standard data warehousing benchmark (TPC-H), our systems is comparable in performance (query latency) to an open-source columnar analytical database (MonetDB) running natively on the same machine! For more details, see: