Publication
JUSTINE (JUST-INsert Engine): Demonstrating Self-organizing Data Schemas
Benjamin Hättasch; Leon Krüger; Carsten Binnig
In: Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (PVLDB), Vol. 18, No. 12, Pages 5283-5286, VLDP, 2025.
Abstract
JUSTINE (JUST-INsert Engine):
Demonstrating Self-organizing Data Schemas
Benjamin Hättasch
benjamin.haettasch@dfki.de
DFKI & TU Darmstadt
Germany
Leon Krüger
leon.krueger@stud.tu-darmstadt.de
TU Darmstadt
Germany
Carsten Binnig
carsten.binnig@cs.tu-darmstadt.de
TU Darmstadt & DFKI
Germany
ABSTRACT
Relational databases are great for data analysis and exploration,
but require a carefully crafted schema, which causes high manual
overhead. Moreover, entities not considered during schema design
cannot be stored. In contrast, schemaless approaches allow users to
store all kinds of data without the need for a schema, but require
schema-checking on read to ensure that queries can read certain
attributes. We therefore advocate for a new class of database sys-
tems that organize the data in a schema autonomously when it is
inserted schemalessly by users. Such databases should thus be able
to store data semantically meaningful but without requiring the
user to design a schema, neither upfront during setup nor when an
insert is executed. In this demo, we showcase JUSTINE, which is a
first implementation of this new class of database systems that can
automatically adjust a database schema based on input queries. Our
showcase features both (1) an interactive mode where attendees can
enter their own data as well as (2) the execution of a full workload
where users can see how the database schema evolves during batch
execution. The workload can be customized by changing different
parameters.