5,325 research outputs found
Towards a Holistic Integration of Spreadsheets with Databases: A Scalable Storage Engine for Presentational Data Management
Spreadsheet software is the tool of choice for interactive ad-hoc data
management, with adoption by billions of users. However, spreadsheets are not
scalable, unlike database systems. On the other hand, database systems, while
highly scalable, do not support interactivity as a first-class primitive. We
are developing DataSpread, to holistically integrate spreadsheets as a
front-end interface with databases as a back-end datastore, providing
scalability to spreadsheets, and interactivity to databases, an integration we
term presentational data management (PDM). In this paper, we make a first step
towards this vision: developing a storage engine for PDM, studying how to
flexibly represent spreadsheet data within a database and how to support and
maintain access by position. We first conduct an extensive survey of
spreadsheet use to motivate our functional requirements for a storage engine
for PDM. We develop a natural set of mechanisms for flexibly representing
spreadsheet data and demonstrate that identifying the optimal representation is
NP-Hard; however, we develop an efficient approach to identify the optimal
representation from an important and intuitive subclass of representations. We
extend our mechanisms with positional access mechanisms that don't suffer from
cascading update issues, leading to constant time access and modification
performance. We evaluate these representations on a workload of typical
spreadsheets and spreadsheet operations, providing up to 20% reduction in
storage, and up to 50% reduction in formula evaluation time
Fast and Simple Relational Processing of Uncertain Data
This paper introduces U-relations, a succinct and purely relational
representation system for uncertain databases. U-relations support
attribute-level uncertainty using vertical partitioning. If we consider
positive relational algebra extended by an operation for computing possible
answers, a query on the logical level can be translated into, and evaluated as,
a single relational algebra query on the U-relation representation. The
translation scheme essentially preserves the size of the query in terms of
number of operations and, in particular, number of joins. Standard techniques
employed in off-the-shelf relational database management systems are effective
for optimizing and processing queries on U-relations. In our experiments we
show that query evaluation on U-relations scales to large amounts of data with
high degrees of uncertainty.Comment: 12 pages, 14 figure
Old Techniques for New Join Algorithms: A Case Study in RDF Processing
Recently there has been significant interest around designing specialized RDF
engines, as traditional query processing mechanisms incur orders of magnitude
performance gaps on many RDF workloads. At the same time researchers have
released new worst-case optimal join algorithms which can be asymptotically
better than the join algorithms in traditional engines. In this paper we apply
worst-case optimal join algorithms to a standard RDF workload, the LUBM
benchmark, for the first time. We do so using two worst-case optimal engines:
(1) LogicBlox, a commercial database engine, and (2) EmptyHeaded, our prototype
research engine with enhanced worst-case optimal join algorithms. We show that
without any added optimizations both LogicBlox and EmptyHeaded outperform two
state-of-the-art specialized RDF engines, RDF-3X and TripleBit, by up to 6x on
cyclic join queries-the queries where traditional optimizers are suboptimal. On
the remaining, less complex queries in the LUBM benchmark, we show that three
classic query optimization techniques enable EmptyHeaded to compete with RDF
engines, even when there is no asymptotic advantage to the worst-case optimal
approach. We validate that our design has merit as EmptyHeaded outperforms
MonetDB by three orders of magnitude and LogicBlox by two orders of magnitude,
while remaining within an order of magnitude of RDF-3X and TripleBit
TOPYDE: A Tool for Physical Database Design
We describe a tool for physical database design based on a combination of theoretical and pragmatic approaches. The tool takes as input a relational schema, the workload defined on the schema, and some additional database characteristics and produces as output a physical schema. For the time being, the tool is tuned towards Ingres
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