2,933 research outputs found
Pathfinder: XQuery - The Relational Way
Relational query processors are probably the best understood (as well as the best engineered) query engines available today. Although carefully tuned to process instances of the relational model (tables of tuples), these processors can also provide a foundation for the evaluation of "alien" (non-relational) query languages: if a relational encoding of the alien data model and its associated query language is given, the RDBMS may act like a special-purpose processor for the new language
Work-Efficient Query Evaluation with PRAMs
The paper studies query evaluation in parallel constant time in the PRAM model. While it is well-known that all relational algebra queries can be evaluated in constant time on an appropriate CRCW-PRAM, this paper is interested in the efficiency of evaluation algorithms, that is, in the number of processors or, asymptotically equivalent, in the work. Naive evaluation in the parallel setting results in huge (polynomial) bounds on the work of such algorithms and in presentations of the result sets that can be extremely scattered in memory. The paper first discusses some obstacles for constant time PRAM query evaluation. It presents algorithms for relational operators that are considerably more efficient than the naive approaches. Further it explores three settings, in which efficient sequential query evaluation algorithms exist: acyclic queries, semi-join algebra queries, and join queries - the latter in the worst-case optimal framework. Under natural assumptions on the representation of the database, the work of the given algorithms matches the best sequential algorithms in the case of semi-join queries, and it comes close in the other two settings. An important tool is the compaction technique from Hagerup (1992)
Knowledge Rich Natural Language Queries over Structured Biological Databases
Increasingly, keyword, natural language and NoSQL queries are being used for
information retrieval from traditional as well as non-traditional databases
such as web, document, image, GIS, legal, and health databases. While their
popularity are undeniable for obvious reasons, their engineering is far from
simple. In most part, semantics and intent preserving mapping of a well
understood natural language query expressed over a structured database schema
to a structured query language is still a difficult task, and research to tame
the complexity is intense. In this paper, we propose a multi-level
knowledge-based middleware to facilitate such mappings that separate the
conceptual level from the physical level. We augment these multi-level
abstractions with a concept reasoner and a query strategy engine to dynamically
link arbitrary natural language querying to well defined structured queries. We
demonstrate the feasibility of our approach by presenting a Datalog based
prototype system, called BioSmart, that can compute responses to arbitrary
natural language queries over arbitrary databases once a syntactic
classification of the natural language query is made
Staircase Join: Teach a Relational DBMS to Watch its (Axis) Steps
Relational query processors derive much of their effectiveness from the awareness of specific table properties like sort order, size, or absence of duplicate tuples. This text applies (and adapts) this successful principle to database-supported XML and XPath processing: the relational system is made tree aware, i.e., tree properties like subtree size, intersection of paths, inclusion or disjointness of subtrees are made explicit. We propose a local change to the database kernel, the staircase join, which encapsulates the necessary tree knowledge needed to improve XPath performance. Staircase join operates on an XML encoding which makes this knowledge available at the cost of simple integer operations (e.g., +, <=). We finally report on quite promising experiments with a staircase join enhanced main-memory database kernel
LiteMat: a scalable, cost-efficient inference encoding scheme for large RDF graphs
The number of linked data sources and the size of the linked open data graph
keep growing every day. As a consequence, semantic RDF services are more and
more confronted with various "big data" problems. Query processing in the
presence of inferences is one them. For instance, to complete the answer set of
SPARQL queries, RDF database systems evaluate semantic RDFS relationships
(subPropertyOf, subClassOf) through time-consuming query rewriting algorithms
or space-consuming data materialization solutions. To reduce the memory
footprint and ease the exchange of large datasets, these systems generally
apply a dictionary approach for compressing triple data sizes by replacing
resource identifiers (IRIs), blank nodes and literals with integer values. In
this article, we present a structured resource identification scheme using a
clever encoding of concepts and property hierarchies for efficiently evaluating
the main common RDFS entailment rules while minimizing triple materialization
and query rewriting. We will show how this encoding can be computed by a
scalable parallel algorithm and directly be implemented over the Apache Spark
framework. The efficiency of our encoding scheme is emphasized by an evaluation
conducted over both synthetic and real world datasets.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figur
Scalable Statistical Modeling and Query Processing over Large Scale Uncertain Databases
The past decade has witnessed a large number of novel applications that generate imprecise, uncertain and incomplete data. Examples include monitoring infrastructures such as RFIDs, sensor networks and web-based applications such as information extraction, data integration, social networking and so on. In my dissertation, I addressed several challenges in managing such data and developed algorithms for efficiently executing queries over large volumes of such data. Specifically, I focused on the following challenges.
First, for meaningful analysis of such data, we need the ability to remove noise and infer useful information from uncertain data. To address this challenge, I first developed a declarative system for applying dynamic probabilistic models to databases and data streams. The output of such probabilistic modeling is probabilistic data, i.e., data annotated with probabilities of correctness/existence. Often, the data also exhibits strong correlations. Although there is prior work in managing and querying such probabilistic data using probabilistic databases, those approaches largely assume independence and cannot handle probabilistic data with rich correlation structures. Hence, I built a probabilistic database system that can manage large-scale correlations and developed algorithms for efficient query evaluation. Our system allows users to provide uncertain data as input and to specify arbitrary correlations among the entries in the database. In the back end, we represent correlations as a forest of junction trees, an alternative representation for probabilistic graphical models (PGM). We execute queries over the probabilistic database by transforming them into message passing algorithms (inference) over the junction tree. However, traditional algorithms over junction trees typically require accessing the entire tree, even for small queries. Hence, I developed an index data structure over the junction tree called INDSEP that allows us to circumvent this process and thereby scalably evaluate inference queries, aggregation queries and SQL queries over the probabilistic database.
Finally, query evaluation in probabilistic databases typically returns output tuples along with their probability values. However, the existing query evaluation model provides very little intuition to the users: for instance, a user might want to know Why is this tuple in my result? or Why does this output tuple have such high probability? or Which are the most influential input tuples for my query ?'' Hence, I designed a query evaluation model, and a suite of algorithms, that provide users with explanations for query results, and enable users to perform sensitivity analysis to better understand the query results
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