Query shredding: Efficient relational evaluation of queries over nested multisets (extended version)

Abstract: Nested relational query languages have been explored extensively, and underlie industrial language-integrated query systems such as Microsoft's LINQ. However, relational databases do not natively support nested collections in query results. This can lead to major performance problems: if programmers write queries that yield nested results, then such systems typically either fail or generate a large number of queries. We present a new approach to query shredding, which converts a query returning nested data to a fixed number of SQL queries. Our approach, in contrast to prior work, handles multiset semantics, and generates an idiomatic SQL:1999 query directly from a normal form for nested queries. We provide a detailed description of our translation and present experiments showing that it offers comparable or better performance than a recent alternative approach on a range of examples.