Set-Oriented Mining for Association Rules in Relational Databases

Describe set-oriented algorithms for mining association rules. Such algorithms imply performing multiple joins and may appear to be inherently less efficient than special-purpose algorithms. We develop new algorithms that can be expressed as SQL queries, and discuss the optimization of these algorithms. After analytical evaluation, an algorithm named SETM emerges as the algorithm of choice. SETM uses only simple database primitives, viz. sorting and merge-scan join. SETM is simple, fast and stable over the range of parameter values. The major contribution of this paper is that it shows that at least some aspects of data mining can be carried out by using general query languages such as SQL, rather than by developing specialized black-box algorithms. The set-oriented nature of SETM facilitates the development of extension

The End of Slow Networks: It's Time for a Redesign

Next generation high-performance RDMA-capable networks will require a fundamental rethinking of the design and architecture of modern distributed DBMSs. These systems are commonly designed and optimized under the assumption that the network is the bottleneck: the network is slow and "thin", and thus needs to be avoided as much as possible. Yet this assumption no longer holds true. With InfiniBand FDR 4x, the bandwidth available to transfer data across network is in the same ballpark as the bandwidth of one memory channel, and it increases even further with the most recent EDR standard. Moreover, with the increasing advances of RDMA, the latency improves similarly fast. In this paper, we first argue that the "old" distributed database design is not capable of taking full advantage of the network. Second, we propose architectural redesigns for OLTP, OLAP and advanced analytical frameworks to take better advantage of the improved bandwidth, latency and RDMA capabilities. Finally, for each of the workload categories, we show that remarkable performance improvements can be achieved

Set-oriented data mining in relational databases

Data mining is an important real-life application for businesses. It is critical to find efficient ways of mining large data sets. In order to benefit from the experience with relational databases, a set-oriented approach to mining data is needed. In such an approach, the data mining operations are expressed in terms of relational or set-oriented operations. Query optimization technology can then be used for efficient processing.\ud \ud In this paper, we describe set-oriented algorithms for mining association rules. Such algorithms imply performing multiple joins and thus may appear to be inherently less efficient than special-purpose algorithms. We develop new algorithms that can be expressed as SQL queries, and discuss optimization of these algorithms. After analytical evaluation, an algorithm named SETM emerges as the algorithm of choice. Algorithm SETM uses only simple database primitives, viz., sorting and merge-scan join. Algorithm SETM is simple, fast, and stable over the range of parameter values. It is easily parallelized and we suggest several additional optimizations. The set-oriented nature of Algorithm SETM makes it possible to develop extensions easily and its performance makes it feasible to build interactive data mining tools for large databases

Compressing DNA sequence databases with coil

Background: Publicly available DNA sequence databases such as GenBank are large, and are growing at an exponential rate. The sheer volume of data being dealt with presents serious storage and data communications problems. Currently, sequence data is usually kept in large "flat files," which are then compressed using standard Lempel-Ziv (gzip) compression – an approach which rarely achieves good compression ratios. While much research has been done on compressing individual DNA sequences, surprisingly little has focused on the compression of entire databases of such sequences. In this study we introduce the sequence database compression software coil. Results: We have designed and implemented a portable software package, coil, for compressing and decompressing DNA sequence databases based on the idea of edit-tree coding. coil is geared towards achieving high compression ratios at the expense of execution time and memory usage during compression – the compression time represents a "one-off investment" whose cost is quickly amortised if the resulting compressed file is transmitted many times. Decompression requires little memory and is extremely fast. We demonstrate a 5% improvement in compression ratio over state-of-the-art general-purpose compression tools for a large GenBank database file containing Expressed Sequence Tag (EST) data. Finally, coil can efficiently encode incremental additions to a sequence database. Conclusion: coil presents a compelling alternative to conventional compression of flat files for the storage and distribution of DNA sequence databases having a narrow distribution of sequence lengths, such as EST data. Increasing compression levels for databases having a wide distribution of sequence lengths is a direction for future work