PushdownDB: Accelerating a DBMS Using S3 Computation

This paper studies the effectiveness of pushing parts of DBMS analytics queries into the Simple Storage Service (S3) of Amazon Web Services (AWS), using a recently released capability called S3 Select. We show that some DBMS primitives (filter, projection, and aggregation) can always be cost-effectively moved into S3. Other more complex operations (join, top-K, and group-by) require reimplementation to take advantage of S3 Select and are often candidates for pushdown. We demonstrate these capabilities through experimentation using a new DBMS that we developed, PushdownDB. Experimentation with a collection of queries including TPC-H queries shows that PushdownDB is on average 30% cheaper and 6.7× faster than a baseline that does not use S3 Select.