Sarasate: a strong representation system for networking policies

ABSTRACTPolicy information in computer networking today is hard to manage. This is in sharp contrast to relational data structured in a database that allows easy access. In this demonstration, we ask why cannot (or how can) turn network policies into relational data. Our key observation is that oftentimes a policy does not prescribe a single ``definite'' network state, but rather is an ``incomplete'' description of all the legitimate network states. Based on this idea, we adopt conditional tables and the usual SQL interface (a relational structure developed for incomplete database) as a means to represent and query sets of network states in exactly the same way as a single definite network snapshot. More importantly, like relational tables that improve data productivity and innovation, relational policies allow us to extend a rich set of data mediating methods to address the networking problem of coordinating policies in a distributed environment.