An Empirical Analysis of Just-in-Time Compilation in Modern Databases

JIT (Just-in-Time) technology has garnered significant attention for improving the efficiency of database execution. It offers higher performance by eliminating interpretation overhead compared to traditional execution engines. LLVM serves as the primary JIT architecture, which was implemented in PostgreSQL since version 11. However, recent advancements in WASM-based databases, such as Mutable, present an alternative JIT approach. This approach minimizes the extensive engineering efforts associated with the execution engine and focuses on optimizing supported operators for lower latency and higher throughput. In this paper, we perform comprehensive experiments on these two representative open-source databases to gain deeper insights into the effectiveness of different JIT architectures.