MonetDBLite: An Embedded Analytical Database

Abstract

While traditional RDBMSes offer a lot of advantages, they require significant effort to setup and to use. Because of these challenges, many data scientists and analysts have switched to using alternative data management solutions. These alternatives, however, lack features that are standard for RDBMSes, e.g. out-of-core query execution. In this paper, we introduce the embedded analytical database MonetDBLite. MonetDBLite is designed to be both highly efficient and easy to use in conjunction with standard analytical tools. It can be installed using standard package managers, and requires no configuration or server management. It is designed for OLAP scenarios, and offers near-instantaneous data transfer between the database and analytical tools, all the while maintaining the transactional guarantees and ACID properties of a standard relational system. These properties make MonetDBLite highly suitable as a storage engine for data used in analytics, machine learning and classification tasks.