{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/laradb-a-minimalist-kernel-for-linear-and","title":"LaraDB: A Minimalist Kernel for Linear and Relational Algebra Computation","arxiv_id":"1703.07342","date":"2017-03-21","proceeding":null,"authors":["Dylan Hutchison","Bill Howe","Dan Suciu"],"abstract":"Analytics tasks manipulate structured data with variants of relational algebra (RA) and quantitative data with variants of linear algebra (LA). The two computational models have overlapping expressiveness, motivating a common programming model that affords unified reasoning and algorithm design. At the logical level we propose Lara, a lean algebra of three operators, that expresses RA and LA as well as relevant optimization rules. We show a series of proofs that position Lara %formal and informal at just the right level of expressiveness for a middleware algebra: more explicit than MapReduce but more general than RA or LA. At the physical level we find that the Lara operators afford efficient implementations using a single primitive that is available in a variety of backend engines: range scans over partitioned sorted maps. To evaluate these ideas, we implemented the Lara operators as range iterators in Apache Accumulo, a popular implementation of Google's BigTable. First we show how Lara expresses a sensor quality control task, and we measure the performance impact of optimizations Lara admits on this task. Second we show that the LaraDB implementation outperforms Accumulo's native MapReduce integration on a core task involving join and aggregation in the form of matrix multiply, especially at smaller scales that are typically a poor fit for scale-out approaches. We find that LaraDB offers a conceptually lean framework for optimizing mixed-abstraction analytics tasks, without giving up fast record-level updates and scans.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.07342v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.07342v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"laradb-a-minimalist-kernel-for-linear-and","repo_url":"https://github.com/dhutchis/LaraDB","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}