View Selection in Semantic Web Databases

We consider the setting of a Semantic Web database, containing both explicit data encoded in RDF triples, and implicit data, implied by the RDF semantics. Based on a query workload, we address the problem of selecting a set of views to be materialized in the database, minimizing a combination of query processing, view storage, and view maintenance costs. Starting from an existing relational view selection method, we devise new algorithms for recommending view sets, and show that they scale significantly beyond the existing relational ones when adapted to the RDF context. To account for implicit triples in query answers, we propose a novel RDF query reformulation algorithm and an innovative way of incorporating it into view selection in order to avoid a combinatorial explosion in the complexity of the selection process. The interest of our techniques is demonstrated through a set of experiments.Comment: VLDB201

A unified view of data-intensive flows in business intelligence systems : a survey

Data-intensive flows are central processes in today’s business intelligence (BI) systems, deploying different technologies to deliver data, from a multitude of data sources, in user-preferred and analysis-ready formats. To meet complex requirements of next generation BI systems, we often need an effective combination of the traditionally batched extract-transform-load (ETL) processes that populate a data warehouse (DW) from integrated data sources, and more real-time and operational data flows that integrate source data at runtime. Both academia and industry thus must have a clear understanding of the foundations of data-intensive flows and the challenges of moving towards next generation BI environments. In this paper we present a survey of today’s research on data-intensive flows and the related fundamental fields of database theory. The study is based on a proposed set of dimensions describing the important challenges of data-intensive flows in the next generation BI setting. As a result of this survey, we envision an architecture of a system for managing the lifecycle of data-intensive flows. The results further provide a comprehensive understanding of data-intensive flows, recognizing challenges that still are to be addressed, and how the current solutions can be applied for addressing these challenges.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

XML Reconstruction View Selection in XML Databases: Complexity Analysis and Approximation Scheme

Query evaluation in an XML database requires reconstructing XML subtrees rooted at nodes found by an XML query. Since XML subtree reconstruction can be expensive, one approach to improve query response time is to use reconstruction views - materialized XML subtrees of an XML document, whose nodes are frequently accessed by XML queries. For this approach to be efficient, the principal requirement is a framework for view selection. In this work, we are the first to formalize and study the problem of XML reconstruction view selection. The input is a tree $T$, in which every node $i$ has a size $c_i$ and profit $p_i$, and the size limitation $C$. The target is to find a subset of subtrees rooted at nodes $i_1,\cdots, i_k$ respectively such that $c_{i_1}+\cdots +c_{i_k}\le C$, and $p_{i_1}+\cdots +p_{i_k}$ is maximal. Furthermore, there is no overlap between any two subtrees selected in the solution. We prove that this problem is NP-hard and present a fully polynomial-time approximation scheme (FPTAS) as a solution

Database Learning: Toward a Database that Becomes Smarter Every Time

In today's databases, previous query answers rarely benefit answering future queries. For the first time, to the best of our knowledge, we change this paradigm in an approximate query processing (AQP) context. We make the following observation: the answer to each query reveals some degree of knowledge about the answer to another query because their answers stem from the same underlying distribution that has produced the entire dataset. Exploiting and refining this knowledge should allow us to answer queries more analytically, rather than by reading enormous amounts of raw data. Also, processing more queries should continuously enhance our knowledge of the underlying distribution, and hence lead to increasingly faster response times for future queries. We call this novel idea---learning from past query answers---Database Learning. We exploit the principle of maximum entropy to produce answers, which are in expectation guaranteed to be more accurate than existing sample-based approximations. Empowered by this idea, we build a query engine on top of Spark SQL, called Verdict. We conduct extensive experiments on real-world query traces from a large customer of a major database vendor. Our results demonstrate that Verdict supports 73.7% of these queries, speeding them up by up to 23.0x for the same accuracy level compared to existing AQP systems.Comment: This manuscript is an extended report of the work published in ACM SIGMOD conference 201

Secure Querying of Recursive XML Views: A Standard XPath-based Technique

Most state-of-the art approaches for securing XML documents allow users to access data only through authorized views defined by annotating an XML grammar (e.g. DTD) with a collection of XPath expressions. To prevent improper disclosure of confidential information, user queries posed on these views need to be rewritten into equivalent queries on the underlying documents. This rewriting enables us to avoid the overhead of view materialization and maintenance. A major concern here is that query rewriting for recursive XML views is still an open problem. To overcome this problem, some works have been proposed to translate XPath queries into non-standard ones, called Regular XPath queries. However, query rewriting under Regular XPath can be of exponential size as it relies on automaton model. Most importantly, Regular XPath remains a theoretical achievement. Indeed, it is not commonly used in practice as translation and evaluation tools are not available. In this paper, we show that query rewriting is always possible for recursive XML views using only the expressive power of the standard XPath. We investigate the extension of the downward class of XPath, composed only by child and descendant axes, with some axes and operators and we propose a general approach to rewrite queries under recursive XML views. Unlike Regular XPath-based works, we provide a rewriting algorithm which processes the query only over the annotated DTD grammar and which can run in linear time in the size of the query. An experimental evaluation demonstrates that our algorithm is efficient and scales well.Comment: (2011

A Framework for Developing Real-Time OLAP algorithm using Multi-core processing and GPU: Heterogeneous Computing

The overwhelmingly increasing amount of stored data has spurred researchers seeking different methods in order to optimally take advantage of it which mostly have faced a response time problem as a result of this enormous size of data. Most of solutions have suggested materialization as a favourite solution. However, such a solution cannot attain Real- Time answers anyhow. In this paper we propose a framework illustrating the barriers and suggested solutions in the way of achieving Real-Time OLAP answers that are significantly used in decision support systems and data warehouses