Enabling Secure Database as a Service using Fully Homomorphic Encryption: Challenges and Opportunities

The database community, at least for the last decade, has been grappling with querying encrypted data, which would enable secure database as a service solutions. A recent breakthrough in the cryptographic community (in 2009) related to fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) showed that arbitrary computation on encrypted data is possible. Successful adoption of FHE for query processing is, however, still a distant dream, and numerous challenges have to be addressed. One challenge is how to perform algebraic query processing of encrypted data, where we produce encrypted intermediate results and operations on encrypted data can be composed. In this paper, we describe our solution for algebraic query processing of encrypted data, and also outline several other challenges that need to be addressed, while also describing the lessons that can be learnt from a decade of work by the database community in querying encrypted data

The Mirror DBMS at TREC-8

The database group at University of Twente participates in TREC8 using the Mirror DBMS, a prototype database system especially designed for multimedia and web retrieval. From a database perspective, the purpose has been to check whether we can get sufficient performance, and to prepare for the very large corpus track in which we plan to participate next year. From an IR perspective, the experiments have been designed to learn more about the effect of the global statistics on the ranking

The Family of MapReduce and Large Scale Data Processing Systems

In the last two decades, the continuous increase of computational power has produced an overwhelming flow of data which has called for a paradigm shift in the computing architecture and large scale data processing mechanisms. MapReduce is a simple and powerful programming model that enables easy development of scalable parallel applications to process vast amounts of data on large clusters of commodity machines. It isolates the application from the details of running a distributed program such as issues on data distribution, scheduling and fault tolerance. However, the original implementation of the MapReduce framework had some limitations that have been tackled by many research efforts in several followup works after its introduction. This article provides a comprehensive survey for a family of approaches and mechanisms of large scale data processing mechanisms that have been implemented based on the original idea of the MapReduce framework and are currently gaining a lot of momentum in both research and industrial communities. We also cover a set of introduced systems that have been implemented to provide declarative programming interfaces on top of the MapReduce framework. In addition, we review several large scale data processing systems that resemble some of the ideas of the MapReduce framework for different purposes and application scenarios. Finally, we discuss some of the future research directions for implementing the next generation of MapReduce-like solutions.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1105.4252 by other author

Proceedings TLAD 2012:10th International Workshop on the Teaching, Learning and Assessment of Databases

This is the tenth in the series of highly successful international workshops on the Teaching, Learning and Assessment of Databases (TLAD 2012). TLAD 2012 is held on the 9th July at the University of Hertfordshire and hopes to be just as successful as its predecessors. The teaching of databases is central to all Computing Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems and Information Technology courses, and this year, the workshop aims to continue the tradition of bringing together both database teachers and researchers, in order to share good learning, teaching and assessment practice and experience, and further the growing community amongst database academics. As well as attracting academics and teachers from the UK community, the workshop has also been successful in attracting academics from the wider international community, through serving on the programme committee, and attending and presenting papers. Due to the healthy number of high quality submissions this year, the workshop will present eight peer reviewed papers. Of these, six will be presented as full papers and two as short papers. These papers cover a number of themes, including: the teaching of data mining and data warehousing, SQL and NoSQL, databases at school, and database curricula themselves. The final paper will give a timely ten-year review of TLAD workshops, and it is expected that these papers will lead to a stimulating closing discussion, which will continue beyond the workshop. We also look forward to a keynote presentation by Karen Fraser, who has contributed to many TLAD workshops as the HEA organizer. Titled “An Effective Higher Education Academy”, the keynote will discuss the Academy’s plans for the future and outline how participants can get involved

Proceedings TLAD 2012:10th International Workshop on the Teaching, Learning and Assessment of Databases

This is the tenth in the series of highly successful international workshops on the Teaching, Learning and Assessment of Databases (TLAD 2012). TLAD 2012 is held on the 9th July at the University of Hertfordshire and hopes to be just as successful as its predecessors. The teaching of databases is central to all Computing Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems and Information Technology courses, and this year, the workshop aims to continue the tradition of bringing together both database teachers and researchers, in order to share good learning, teaching and assessment practice and experience, and further the growing community amongst database academics. As well as attracting academics and teachers from the UK community, the workshop has also been successful in attracting academics from the wider international community, through serving on the programme committee, and attending and presenting papers. Due to the healthy number of high quality submissions this year, the workshop will present eight peer reviewed papers. Of these, six will be presented as full papers and two as short papers. These papers cover a number of themes, including: the teaching of data mining and data warehousing, SQL and NoSQL, databases at school, and database curricula themselves. The final paper will give a timely ten-year review of TLAD workshops, and it is expected that these papers will lead to a stimulating closing discussion, which will continue beyond the workshop. We also look forward to a keynote presentation by Karen Fraser, who has contributed to many TLAD workshops as the HEA organizer. Titled “An Effective Higher Education Academy”, the keynote will discuss the Academy’s plans for the future and outline how participants can get involved

Content And Multimedia Database Management Systems

A database management system is a general-purpose software system that facilitates the processes of defining, constructing, and manipulating databases for various applications. The main characteristic of the ‘database approach’ is that it increases the value of data by its emphasis on data independence. DBMSs, and in particular those based on the relational data model, have been very successful at the management of administrative data in the business domain. This thesis has investigated data management in multimedia digital libraries, and its implications on the design of database management systems. The main problem of multimedia data management is providing access to the stored objects. The content structure of administrative data is easily represented in alphanumeric values. Thus, database technology has primarily focused on handling the objects’ logical structure. In the case of multimedia data, representation of content is far from trivial though, and not supported by current database management systems