13,386 research outputs found
A Call to Arms: Revisiting Database Design
Good database design is crucial to obtain a sound, consistent database, and -
in turn - good database design methodologies are the best way to achieve the
right design. These methodologies are taught to most Computer Science
undergraduates, as part of any Introduction to Database class. They can be
considered part of the "canon", and indeed, the overall approach to database
design has been unchanged for years. Moreover, none of the major database
research assessments identify database design as a strategic research
direction.
Should we conclude that database design is a solved problem?
Our thesis is that database design remains a critical unsolved problem.
Hence, it should be the subject of more research. Our starting point is the
observation that traditional database design is not used in practice - and if
it were used it would result in designs that are not well adapted to current
environments. In short, database design has failed to keep up with the times.
In this paper, we put forth arguments to support our viewpoint, analyze the
root causes of this situation and suggest some avenues of research.Comment: Removed spurious column break. Nothing else was change
Secondary Indexing in One Dimension: Beyond B-trees and Bitmap Indexes
Let S be a finite, ordered alphabet, and let x = x_1 x_2 ... x_n be a string
over S. A "secondary index" for x answers alphabet range queries of the form:
Given a range [a_l,a_r] over S, return the set I_{[a_l;a_r]} = {i |x_i \in
[a_l; a_r]}. Secondary indexes are heavily used in relational databases and
scientific data analysis. It is well-known that the obvious solution, storing a
dictionary for the position set associated with each character, does not always
give optimal query time. In this paper we give the first theoretically optimal
data structure for the secondary indexing problem. In the I/O model, the amount
of data read when answering a query is within a constant factor of the minimum
space needed to represent I_{[a_l;a_r]}, assuming that the size of internal
memory is (|S| log n)^{delta} blocks, for some constant delta > 0. The space
usage of the data structure is O(n log |S|) bits in the worst case, and we
further show how to bound the size of the data structure in terms of the 0-th
order entropy of x. We show how to support updates achieving various time-space
trade-offs.
We also consider an approximate version of the basic secondary indexing
problem where a query reports a superset of I_{[a_l;a_r]} containing each
element not in I_{[a_l;a_r]} with probability at most epsilon, where epsilon >
0 is the false positive probability. For this problem the amount of data that
needs to be read by the query algorithm is reduced to O(|I_{[a_l;a_r]}|
log(1/epsilon)) bits.Comment: 16 page
Generic Subsequence Matching Framework: Modularity, Flexibility, Efficiency
Subsequence matching has appeared to be an ideal approach for solving many
problems related to the fields of data mining and similarity retrieval. It has
been shown that almost any data class (audio, image, biometrics, signals) is or
can be represented by some kind of time series or string of symbols, which can
be seen as an input for various subsequence matching approaches. The variety of
data types, specific tasks and their partial or full solutions is so wide that
the choice, implementation and parametrization of a suitable solution for a
given task might be complicated and time-consuming; a possibly fruitful
combination of fragments from different research areas may not be obvious nor
easy to realize. The leading authors of this field also mention the
implementation bias that makes difficult a proper comparison of competing
approaches. Therefore we present a new generic Subsequence Matching Framework
(SMF) that tries to overcome the aforementioned problems by a uniform frame
that simplifies and speeds up the design, development and evaluation of
subsequence matching related systems. We identify several relatively separate
subtasks solved differently over the literature and SMF enables to combine them
in straightforward manner achieving new quality and efficiency. This framework
can be used in many application domains and its components can be reused
effectively. Its strictly modular architecture and openness enables also
involvement of efficient solutions from different fields, for instance
efficient metric-based indexes. This is an extended version of a paper
published on DEXA 2012.Comment: This is an extended version of a paper published on DEXA 201
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