Relational Playground: Teaching the Duality of Relational Algebra and SQL

Students in introductory data management courses are often taught how to write queries in SQL. This is a useful and practical skill, but it gives limited insight into how queries are processed by relational database engines. In contrast, relational algebra is a commonly used internal representation of queries by database engines, but can be challenging for students to grasp. We developed a tool we call Relational Playground for database students to explore the connection between relational algebra and SQL

When Things Matter: A Data-Centric View of the Internet of Things

With the recent advances in radio-frequency identification (RFID), low-cost wireless sensor devices, and Web technologies, the Internet of Things (IoT) approach has gained momentum in connecting everyday objects to the Internet and facilitating machine-to-human and machine-to-machine communication with the physical world. While IoT offers the capability to connect and integrate both digital and physical entities, enabling a whole new class of applications and services, several significant challenges need to be addressed before these applications and services can be fully realized. A fundamental challenge centers around managing IoT data, typically produced in dynamic and volatile environments, which is not only extremely large in scale and volume, but also noisy, and continuous. This article surveys the main techniques and state-of-the-art research efforts in IoT from data-centric perspectives, including data stream processing, data storage models, complex event processing, and searching in IoT. Open research issues for IoT data management are also discussed

A comparison of statistical machine learning methods in heartbeat detection and classification

In health care, patients with heart problems require quick responsiveness in a clinical setting or in the operating theatre. Towards that end, automated classification of heartbeats is vital as some heartbeat irregularities are time consuming to detect. Therefore, analysis of electro-cardiogram (ECG) signals is an active area of research. The methods proposed in the literature depend on the structure of a heartbeat cycle. In this paper, we use interval and amplitude based features together with a few samples from the ECG signal as a feature vector. We studied a variety of classification algorithms focused especially on a type of arrhythmia known as the ventricular ectopic fibrillation (VEB). We compare the performance of the classifiers against algorithms proposed in the literature and make recommendations regarding features, sampling rate, and choice of the classifier to apply in a real-time clinical setting. The extensive study is based on the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database. Our main contribution is the evaluation of existing classifiers over a range sampling rates, recommendation of a detection methodology to employ in a practical setting, and extend the notion of a mixture of experts to a larger class of algorithms

Benchmarking RDF Storage Engines

In this deliverable, we present version V1.0 of SRBench, the first benchmark for Streaming RDF engines, designed in the context of Task 1.4 of PlanetData, completely based on real-world datasets. With the increasing problem of too much streaming data but not enough knowledge, researchers have set out for solutions in which Semantic Web technologies are adapted and extended for the publishing, sharing, analysing and understanding of such data. Various approaches are emerging. To help researchers and users to compare streaming RDF engines in a standardised application scenario, we propose SRBench, with which one can assess the abilities of a streaming RDF engine to cope with a broad range of use cases typically encountered in real-world scenarios. We offer a set of queries that cover the major aspects of streaming RDF engines, ranging from simple pattern matching queries to queries with complex reasoning tasks. To give a first baseline and illustrate the state of the art, we show results obtained from implementing SRBench using the SPARQLStream query-processing engine developed by UPM

Astral: An algebraic approach for sensor data stream querying

The use of sensor based applications is in expansion in many contexts. Sensors are involved at several scales ranging from the individual (e.g. personal monitoring, smart homes) to regional and even world wide contexts (i.e. logistics, natural resource monitoring and forecast). Easy and efficient management of data streams produced by a large number of heterogeneous sensors is a key issue to support such applications. Numerous solutions for query processing on data streams have been proposed by the scientific community. Several query processors have been implemented and offer heterogeneous querying capabilities and semantics. Our work is a contribution on the formalization of queries on data streams in general, and on sensor data in particular. This paper proposes the Astral algebra; defining operators on temporal relations and streams which allow the expression of a large variety of queries. This proposal extends several aspects of existing results: it presents precise formal definitions of operators which are (or may be) semantically ambiguous and it demonstrates several properties of such operators. Such properties are an important result for query optimization as they are helpful in query rewriting and operator sharing. This formalization deepens the understanding of the queries and facilitates the comparison of the semantics implemented by existing systems. This is an essential step in building mediation solutions involving heterogeneous data stream processing systems. Cross system data exchange and application coupling would be facilitated. This paper discusses existing proposals, presents the Astral algebra, several properties of the operators

Design and Implementation of a Middleware for Uniform, Federated and Dynamic Event Processing

In recent years, real-time processing of massive event streams has become an important topic in the area of data analytics. It will become even more important in the future due to cheap sensors, a growing amount of devices and their ubiquitous inter-connection also known as the Internet of Things (IoT). Academia, industry and the open source community have developed several event processing (EP) systems that allow users to define, manage and execute continuous queries over event streams. They achieve a significantly better performance than the traditional store-then-process'' approach in which events are first stored and indexed in a database. Because EP systems have different roots and because of the lack of standardization, the system landscape became highly heterogenous. Today's EP systems differ in APIs, execution behaviors and query languages. This thesis presents the design and implementation of a novel middleware that abstracts from different EP systems and provides a uniform API, execution behavior and query language to users and developers. As a consequence, the presented middleware overcomes the problem of vendor lock-in and different EP systems are enabled to cooperate with each other. In practice, event streams differ dramatically in volume and velocity. We show therefore how the middleware can connect to not only different EP systems, but also database systems and a native implementation. Emerging applications such as the IoT raise novel challenges and require EP to be more dynamic. We present extensions to the middleware that enable self-adaptivity which is needed in context-sensitive applications and those that deal with constantly varying sets of event producers and consumers. Lastly, we extend the middleware to fully support the processing of events containing spatial data and to be able to run distributed in the form of a federation of heterogenous EP systems

Bench-Ranking: ettekirjutav analüüsimeetod suurte teadmiste graafide päringutele

Relatsiooniliste suurandmete (BD) töötlemisraamistike kasutamine suurte teadmiste graafide töötlemiseks kätkeb endas võimalust päringu jõudlust optimeerimida. Kaasaegsed BD-süsteemid on samas keerulised andmesüsteemid, mille konfiguratsioonid omavad olulist mõju jõudlusele. Erinevate raamistike ja konfiguratsioonide võrdlusuuringud pakuvad kogukonnale parimaid tavasid parema jõudluse saavutamiseks. Enamik neist võrdlusuuringutest saab liigitada siiski vaid kirjeldavaks ja diagnostiliseks analüütikaks. Lisaks puudub ühtne standard nende uuringute võrdlemiseks kvantitatiivselt järjestatud kujul. Veelgi enam, suurte graafide töötlemiseks vajalike konveierite kavandamine eeldab täiendavaid disainiotsuseid mis tulenevad mitteloomulikust (relatsioonilisest) graafi töötlemise paradigmast. Taolisi disainiotsuseid ei saa automaatselt langetada, nt relatsiooniskeemi, partitsioonitehnika ja salvestusvormingute valikut. Käesolevas töös käsitleme kuidas me antud uurimuslünga täidame. Esmalt näitame disainiotsuste kompromisside mõju BD-süsteemide jõudluse korratavusele suurte teadmiste graafide päringute tegemisel. Lisaks näitame BD-raamistike jõudluse kirjeldavate ja diagnostiliste analüüside piiranguid suurte graafide päringute tegemisel. Seejärel uurime, kuidas lubada ettekirjutavat analüütikat järjestamisfunktsioonide ja mitmemõõtmeliste optimeerimistehnikate (nn "Bench-Ranking") kaudu. See lähenemine peidab kirjeldava tulemusanalüüsi keerukuse, suunates praktiku otse teostatavate teadlike otsusteni.Leveraging relational Big Data (BD) processing frameworks to process large knowledge graphs yields a great interest in optimizing query performance. Modern BD systems are yet complicated data systems, where the configurations notably affect the performance. Benchmarking different frameworks and configurations provides the community with best practices for better performance. However, most of these benchmarking efforts are classified as descriptive and diagnostic analytics. Moreover, there is no standard for comparing these benchmarks based on quantitative ranking techniques. Moreover, designing mature pipelines for processing big graphs entails considering additional design decisions that emerge with the non-native (relational) graph processing paradigm. Those design decisions cannot be decided automatically, e.g., the choice of the relational schema, partitioning technique, and storage formats. Thus, in this thesis, we discuss how our work fills this timely research gap. Particularly, we first show the impact of those design decisions’ trade-offs on the BD systems’ performance replicability when querying large knowledge graphs. Moreover, we showed the limitations of the descriptive and diagnostic analyses of BD frameworks’ performance for querying large graphs. Thus, we investigate how to enable prescriptive analytics via ranking functions and Multi-Dimensional optimization techniques (called ”Bench-Ranking”). This approach abstracts out from the complexity of descriptive performance analysis, guiding the practitioner directly to actionable informed decisions.https://www.ester.ee/record=b553332