Abstract
New research has emerged that revisits the design of various components of a data management system to determine how their designs can exploit the targeted applications and underlying architecture of that system. To support this effort, we introduce a development environment that supports the rapid prototyping, evaluation and refinement of query optimizer components for targeted data management systems. The key features of this development environment are component generator tools that process declarative specifications of the components, component-specific benchmarks and profiling tools. We describe some initial results specific to one optimizer component (the join plan enumerator) and we present some preliminary thoughts about the remaining environment design.