[jira] [Created] (FLINK-1319) Add static code analysis for UDFs

["Stephan Ewen (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org>]

Stephan Ewen created FLINK-1319:
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             Summary: Add static code analysis for UDFs
                 Key: FLINK-1319
                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FLINK-1319
             Project: Flink
          Issue Type: New Feature
          Components: Java API, Scala API
            Reporter: Stephan Ewen
            Priority: Minor


Flink's Optimizer takes information that tells it for UDFs which fields of the input elements are accessed, modified, or frwarded/copied. This information frequently helps to reuse partitionings, sorts, etc. It may speed up programs significantly, as it can frequently eliminate sorts and shuffles, which are costly.

Right now, users can add lightweight annotations to UDFs to provide this information (such as adding {{@ConstandFields("0->3, 1, 2->1")}}.

We worked with static code analysis of UDFs before, to determine this information automatically. This is an incredible feature, as it "magically" makes programs faster.

For record-at-a-time operations (Map, Reduce, FlatMap, Join, Cross), this works surprisingly well in many cases. We used the "Soot" toolkit for the static code analysis. Unfortunately, Soot is LGPL licensed and thus we did not include any of the code so far.

I propose to add this functionality to Flink, in the form of a drop-in addition, to work around the LGPL incompatibility with ALS 2.0. Users could simply download a special "flink-code-analysis.jar" and drop it into the "lib" folder to enable this functionality. We may even add a script to "tools" that downloads that library automatically into the lib folder. This should be legally fine, since we do not redistribute LGPL code and only dynamically link it (the incompatibility with ASL 2.0 is mainly in the patentability, if I remember correctly).

Prior work on this has been done by [~aljoscha] and [~skunert], which could provide a code base to start with.

*Appendix*

Hompage to Soot static analysis toolkit: http://www.sable.mcgill.ca/soot/

Papers on static analysis and for optimization: http://stratosphere.eu/assets/papers/EnablingOperatorReorderingSCA_12.pdf and http://stratosphere.eu/assets/papers/openingTheBlackBoxes_12.pdf

Quick introduction to the Optimizer: http://stratosphere.eu/assets/papers/2014-VLDBJ_Stratosphere_Overview.pdf (Section 6)

Optimizer for Iterations: http://stratosphere.eu/assets/papers/spinningFastIterativeDataFlows_12.pdf (Sections 4.3 and 5.3)



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