32 posts tagged with "tech-blog"

When Velox was open sourced in August 2021, it was not nearly as easily usable and portable as it is today. In order for Velox to become the unified execution engine blurring the boundaries for data analytics and ML, we needed Velox to be easy to build and package on multiple platforms, and support a wide range of hardware architectures. If we are supporting all these platforms, we also need to ensure that Velox remains fast and regressions are caught early.

To improve the Velox experience for users and community developers, Velox has partnered with Voltron Data to help make Velox more accessible and user-friendly. In this blog post, we will examine the challenges we faced, the improvements that have already been made, and the ones yet to come.

This blogpost is part of a series of blog posts that discuss different features and optimizations of the simple function interface in Velox.

Introduction to Simple Functions​

Scalar functions are one of the most used extension points in Velox. Since Velox is a vectorized engine, by nature functions are "vector functions" that consume Velox vectors (batches of data) and produce vectors. Velox allows users to write functions as vector functions or as single-row operations "simple functions" that are converted to vector functions using template expansion through SimpleFunctionAdapter.