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

Reasoning & Querying – State of the Art

Various query languages for Web and Semantic Web data, both for practical use and as an area of research in the scientific community, have emerged in recent years. At the same time, the broad adoption of the internet where keyword search is used in many applications, e.g. search engines, has familiarized casual users with using keyword queries to retrieve information on the internet. Unlike this easy-to-use querying, traditional query languages require knowledge of the language itself as well as of the data to be queried. Keyword-based query languages for XML and RDF bridge the gap between the two, aiming at enabling simple querying of semi-structured data, which is relevant e.g. in the context of the emerging Semantic Web. This article presents an overview of the field of keyword querying for XML and RDF

VAMANA : A High Performance, Scalable and Cost Driven XPath Engine

Many applications are migrating or beginning to make use native XML data. We anticipate that queries will emerge that emphasize the structural semantics of XML query languages like XPath and XQuery. This brings a need for an efficient query engine and database management system tailored for XML data similar to traditional relational engines. While mapping large XML documents into relational database systems while possible, poses difficulty in mapping XML queries to the less powerful relational query language SQL and creates a data model mismatch between relational tables and semi-structured XML data. Hence native solutions to efficiently store and query XML data are being developed recently. However, most of these systems thus far fail to demonstrate scalability with large document sizes, to provide robust support for the XPath query language nor to adequately address costing with respect to query optimization. In this thesis, we propose a novel cost-driven XPath engine to support the scalable evaluation of ad-hoc XPath expressions called VAMANA. VAMANA makes use of an efficient XML repository for storing and indexing large XML documents called the Multi-Axis Storage Structure (MASS) developed at WPI. VAMANA extensively uses indexes for query evaluation by considering index-only plans. To the best of our knowledge, it is the only XML query engine that supports an index plan approach for large XML documents. Our index-oriented query plans allow queries to be evaluated while reading only a fraction of the data, as all tuples for a particular context node are clustered together. The pipelined query framework minimizes the cost of handing intermediate data during query processing. Unlike other native solutions, VAMANA provides support for all 13 XPath axes. Our schema independent cost model provides dynamically calculated statistics that are then used for intelligent cost-based transformations, further improving performance. Our optimization strategy for increasing execution time performance is affirmed through our experimental studies on XMark benchmark data. VAMANA query execution is significantly faster than leading available XML query engines

Fast in-memory XPath search using compressed indexes

A large fraction of an XML document typically consists of text data. The XPath query language allows text search via the equal, contains, and starts-with predicates. Such predicates can be efficiently implemented using a compressed self-index of the document's text nodes. Most queries, however, contain some parts querying the text of the document, plus some parts querying the tree structure. It is therefore a challenge to choose an appropriate evaluation order for a given query, which optimally leverages the execution speeds of the text and tree indexes. Here the SXSI system is introduced. It stores the tree structure of an XML document using a bit array of opening and closing brackets plus a sequence of labels, and stores the text nodes of the document using a global compressed self-index. On top of these indexes sits an XPath query engine that is based on tree automata. The engine uses fast counting queries of the text index in order to dynamically determine whether to evaluate top-down or bottom-up with respect to the tree structure. The resulting system has several advantages over existing systems: (1) on pure tree queries (without text search) such as the XPathMark queries, the SXSI system performs on par or better than the fastest known systems MonetDB and Qizx, (2) on queries that use text search, SXSI outperforms the existing systems by 1-3 orders of magnitude (depending on the size of the result set), and (3) with respect to memory consumption, SXSI outperforms all other systems for counting-only queries.Peer reviewe

A system for large-scale image and video retrieval on everyday scenes

There has been a growing amount of multimedia data generated on the web todayin terms of size and diversity. This has made accurate content retrieval with these large and complex collections of data a challenging problem. Motivated by the need for systems that can enable scalable and efficient search, we propose QIK (Querying Images Using Contextual Knowledge). QIK leverages advances in deep learning (DL) and natural language processing (NLP) for scene understanding to enable large-scale multimedia retrieval on everyday scenes with common objects. The system consists of three major components: Indexer, Query Processor, and Video Processor. Given an image, the Indexer performs probabilistic image understanding (PIU). The PIU generated consists of the most probable captions, parsed and represented by tree structures using NLP techniques, and detected objects. The PIU's are stored and indexed in a database system. For a query image, the Query Processor generates the most probable caption and parses it into the corresponding tree structure. Then an optimized tree-pattern query is constructed and executed on the database to retrieve a set of candidate images. The candidate images fetched are ranked using the tree-edit distance metric computed on the tree structures. Given a video, the Video Processor extracts a sequence of key scenes that are posed to the Query Processor to retrieve a set of candidate scenes. The candidate scene parse trees corresponding to a video are extracted and are ranked based on the number of matching scenes. We evaluated the performance of our system for large-scale image and video retrieval tasks on datasets containing everyday scenes and observed that our system could outperform state-ofthe- art techniques in terms of mean average precision.Includes bibliographical references

Automatic mapping of XML documents into relational database

Extensible Markup Language (XML) nowadays is one of the most important standard media used for exchanging and representing data through the Internet. Storing, updating and retrieving the huge amount of web services data such as XML is an attractive area of research for researchers and database vendors. In this thesis, we propose and develop a new mapping model, called MAXDOR, for storing, rebuilding, updating and querying XML documents using a relational database without making use of any XML schemas in the mapping process. The model addressed the problem of solving the structural hole between ordered hierarchical XML and unordered tabular relational database to enable us to use relational database systems for storing, updating and querying XML data. A multiple link list is used to maintain XML document structure, manage the process of updating document contents and retrieve document contents efficiently. Experiments are done to evaluate MAXDOR model. MAXDOR will be compared with other well-known models available in the literature(Tatarinov et al., 2002) and (Torsten et al., 2004) using total expected value of rebuilding XML document execution time and insertion of token execution time.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo