Photon: A Fast Query Engine for Lakehouse Systems
Summary: Photon is a vectorized Lakehouse query engine, delivering fast queries on raw data lakes and Parquet via Spark API. Design choices (vectorization vs. code generation), memory manager, and SQL/Spark integration enable 10x gains and a 100TB TPC-DS record. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)
Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time
Authors
- 1. Alexander Behm (Databricks)
- 2. Shoumik Palkar (Databricks)
- 3. Utkarsh Agarwal (Databricks)
- 4. Timothy Armstrong (Databricks)
- 5. David Cashman (Databricks)
- 6. Ankur Dave (Databricks)
- 7. Todd Greenstein (Databricks)
- 8. Shant Hovsepian (Databricks)
- 9. Ryan Johnson (Databricks)
- 10. Arvind Sai Krishnan (Databricks)
- 11. Paul Leventis (Databricks)
- 12. Ala Luszczak (Databricks)
- 13. Prashanth Menon (Databricks)
- 14. Mostafa Mokhtar (Databricks)
- 15. Gene Pang (Databricks)
- 16. Sameer Paranjpye (Databricks)
- 17. Greg Rahn (Databricks)
- 18. Bart Samwel (Databricks)
- 19. Tom van Bussel (Databricks)
- 20. Herman van Hovell (Databricks)
- 21. Maryann Xue (Databricks)
- 22. Reynold Xin (Databricks)
- 23. Matei Zaharia (Databricks)
BibTeX Citation
@inproceedings{behm_sigmod22,
title = {{Photon: A Fast Query Engine for Lakehouse Systems}},
author = {Behm, Alexander and Palkar, Shoumik and Agarwal, Utkarsh and Armstrong, Timothy and Cashman, David and Dave, Ankur and Greenstein, Todd and Hovsepian, Shant and Johnson, Ryan and Krishnan, Arvind Sai and Leventis, Paul and Luszczak, Ala and Menon, Prashanth and Mokhtar, Mostafa and Pang, Gene and Paranjpye, Sameer and Rahn, Greg and Samwel, Bart and van Bussel, Tom and van Hovell, Herman and Xue, Maryann and Xin, Reynold and Zaharia, Matei},
series = {{SIGMOD} '22},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
doi = {10.1145/3514221.3526054},
url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3514221.3526054},
year = {2022}
}
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