Google Summer of Code

Welcome to the Polypheny Google Summer of Code (GSoC) project page.

What is GSoC?

Google Summer of Code is designed to encourage the participation in open-source software development. Over the past 19 years, Google Summer of Code has brought together over 20,000 contributors and over 850 open-source projects to create over 45 million lines of code. Google will accept contributor applications from March 18th until April 2nd, 2024.

Polypheny at GSoC

Polypheny is a novel kind of database system that jointly manages data in multiple models. It bridges the gap between polystores and HTAP systems. In contrast to most existing polystore systems, Polypheny offers support for data manipulation queries. Furthermore, it features a flexible schema, supporting schema changes at runtime.

As a polystore, Polypheny seamlessly combines different underlying data storage engines (for instance relational row- and column store databases, graph stores, etc.) to provide excellent query performance independent of the type of workload. Queries are accepted through multiple query interfaces using different query languages and methods. With “Data Sources”, Polypheny even goes a step further in terms of flexibility by enabling data on (remote) database systems to be mapped into the schema of Polypheny.

This is the third time Polypheny participates in the Google Summer of Code. As part of GSoC, we want to introduce new talents to the world of open-source software development and to our community.

By participating in Google Summer of Code, you have the opportunity to contribute to a growing open-source project and expand your knowledge and skills in the process. This program provides an excellent opportunity for individuals to gain hands-on experience in open-source development, collaborate with an open-source community, and build their technical skills. In previous years, our involvement in GSoC has resulted in numerous successful contributions.

Application

If you are interested in the Polypheny project and want to help us with improving and extending Polypheny as part of GSoC we kindly ask you to carefully read and follow these instructions.

We would like to incorporate and integrate you as early as possible into our community. Therefore, we have decided not to add dedicated tests or puzzles which are unrelated to the actual code base. Rather, we ask you to participate in the development of Polypheny by at least one of the means outlined bellow:

• Fixing a good first issue: We have prepared a list of good first issues that contain bugs that have a relatively limited scope and are thus straightforward to fix. We consider this a great opportunity to get started and to familiarize yourself with the code base. When you aim at fixing an issue, you are kindly asked to check the comment thread of the issue in case somebody is already working on a fix. If nobody is working on it already, please leave a comment that indicates your intention to work on it. Please check the contribution section of our webpage for additional details. We are also glad if you leave a star ⭐ on the Polypheny-DB repository.

• Help writing tests: Polypheny is currently undergoing a massive refactoring that will be merged in the next week. To help us identifying and fixing issues on the refactor branch, we ask you to create a comprehensive set of test cases for a yet untested feature of Polypheny and submit these (integration) tests as pull request on the refactor branch.

• Tutorial / Showcase: Write a tutorial on how to use Polypheny for you favorite data analytics project and how you combine and integrate it with your favorite tools and interfaces. Submit the tutorial written according to the markdown syntax described here as issue on the Polypheny-DB repo.

• Improve the documentation: Help us improve the documentation by writing or improving small sections or fixing typos. Please submit your changes by creating an issue on the Polypheny-DB repo. If you identified typos, please annotate a printout of the page and attach it to the issue as a PDF.

For the actual proposal, you can take inspiration from the ideas listed on the ideas page or come up with an entirely new topic. However, please get in touch with us early enough to discuss your proposal idea before submitting it.

Your proposal should include

• a description of and motivation for your project idea,
• a rough time plan and
• details on how to implement your idea and
• the GitHub ID of your pull request.

Please use this template for writing your proposal.

Project Ideas

See GSoC Project Ideas for a list of project ideas.

Mentors

This is the current mentoring team for the Google Summer of Code 2024:

Name	Role	Languages
Isabel Geissmann	Mentor	English, German
Yiming Wu	Mentor	English, Chinese
Martin Vahlensieck	Mentor	English, German
Marc Hennemann	Mentor	English, German
David Lengweiler	Mentor	English, German
Heiko Schuldt	Mentor, OrgAdmin	English, German
Marco Vogt	Mentor, OrgAdmin	English, German

Contact

Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions. To make it easier for us to organize our emails, please add “GSoC 2024” in the subject line.