Providing in RDBMSs the Flexibility to Work with Various Non-Relational Data Models

The inability of pure relational DBMSs to meet the new requirements of the applications which have emerged on the web has led to the advent of NoSQL DBMSs In recent years significant progress has been made in integrating into relational DBMSs the features essentials for taking into consideration these new requirements which mainly concern flexibility performances horizontal scaling and very high availability This paper focuses on the features which can enable the relational DBMSs to provide applications with the flexibility to work with various non-relational data models while providing the guarantees of independence integrity and performance of query evaluatio

Heap Abstractions for Static Analysis

Heap data is potentially unbounded and seemingly arbitrary. As a consequence, unlike stack and static memory, heap memory cannot be abstracted directly in terms of a fixed set of source variable names appearing in the program being analysed. This makes it an interesting topic of study and there is an abundance of literature employing heap abstractions. Although most studies have addressed similar concerns, their formulations and formalisms often seem dissimilar and some times even unrelated. Thus, the insights gained in one description of heap abstraction may not directly carry over to some other description. This survey is a result of our quest for a unifying theme in the existing descriptions of heap abstractions. In particular, our interest lies in the abstractions and not in the algorithms that construct them. In our search of a unified theme, we view a heap abstraction as consisting of two features: a heap model to represent the heap memory and a summarization technique for bounding the heap representation. We classify the models as storeless, store based, and hybrid. We describe various summarization techniques based on k-limiting, allocation sites, patterns, variables, other generic instrumentation predicates, and higher-order logics. This approach allows us to compare the insights of a large number of seemingly dissimilar heap abstractions and also paves way for creating new abstractions by mix-and-match of models and summarization techniques.Comment: 49 pages, 20 figure

The Application of Object-Oriented Views to an Engineering Environment.

With the increasing popularity of object-oriented technology, object-oriented database systems are being used in design environments as central repositories. In this thesis, we investigate the role of versioning and the characteristics of design databases in design environments. In an effort to improve the configuration management scheme in a design environment, we also investigate the use of database views as a possible configuration tool. We propose a unified version management scheme that facilitates cooperative team work and show that the use of database views provides a powerful configuration management scheme for a design environment

Flexible Data Refreshing Architecture for Health Information System Integration

Background: Having a consistent and unified view of heterogeneous distributed medical information sources is an inevitable need of health informatics. Integrating medical information of patients or about a disease, a treatment or side effects of a drug, etc, is very useful to help medical education, to achieve medical research goals and to provide the computer- based decision support systems. Contribution: This article proposes a flexible incremental update method for the materialized part of the integration system. It permits us to manage the integration system according to the characteristics of the data sources which can change. Method: This paper presents a hybrid data integration approach in which the materialized part of the system in mediator is the object indexation structure based on an instance classification of the sources objects which correspond to the global schema. The object identifier of each object in the indexation structure is materialized together with the attributes which are needed for the incremental updating of this indexation (classifying attributes). Results: The main idea of this paper is to develop a hybrid data integration framework, which represents a new aspect of a hybrid method focusing on flexible data refreshing. Conclusion: This hybrid approach implements a vertical hybrid approach. It means that at the mediator level, some data of each object are materialized and others are virtual

Virtual information in the INFOPLEX database computer

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Alfred P. Sloan School of Management, 1980.MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND DEWEY.Includes bibliographical references.by Lawrence Abram Krakauer.M.S

Sublimate: State-Changing Virtual and Physical Rendering to Augment Interaction with Shape Displays

Recent research in 3D user interfaces pushes towards immersive graphics and actuated shape displays. Our work explores the hybrid of these directions, and we introduce sublimation and deposition, as metaphors for the transitions between physical and virtual states. We discuss how digital models, handles and controls can be interacted with as virtual 3D graphics or dynamic physical shapes, and how user interfaces can rapidly and fluidly switch between those representations. To explore this space, we developed two systems that integrate actuated shape displays and augmented reality (AR) for co-located physical shapes and 3D graphics. Our spatial optical see-through display provides a single user with head-tracked stereoscopic augmentation, whereas our handheld devices enable multi-user interaction through video seethrough AR. We describe interaction techniques and applications that explore 3D interaction for these new modalities. We conclude by discussing the results from a user study that show how freehand interaction with physical shape displays and co-located graphics can outperform wand-based interaction with virtual 3D graphics.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Graduate Research Fellowship Grant 1122374

Ingenious, eloquent and persuasive? Towards a critique of architecture as communication

The cultural role of architecture is viewed here in terms of the extent to which architecture participates in communicative processes. The rationale for this perspective is traced broadly through the lineage of Pragmatism culminating in the work of Rorty, which offers ‘social hope’; communication is ultimately directed toward human solidarity. In this context the achievement of modernist architecture is at best ambivalent. The utopian quest for transparency and solidity in architectural form represented a turn against the scenographic dimension of urban design, the very dimension in which the narrative, the symbolic and the connotative are most readily expressed. Postmodern architecture, proponents of which often profess explicitly critical and communicative ambitions, fares no better. The deconstructive, double coded and contradictory tendencies in such work may support its criticality but often result in isolated statements as likely to confuse and frustrate its users as facilitate productive relations. The question arises, therefore, of how we are to make sense of the various strands of twentieth and early twenty-first century architecture. This paper is speculative. It reviews a selection of research projects carried out by members of a postgraduate research group in the Lincoln School of Architecture in 2010. Six propositions concerning the relationship between architecture and communication were presented to the group in November 2009. Each project developed a critical response to one or more of these, with the intention of engaging in debate ultimately about the cultural role of architecture. In true Rortian style, the conclusions concern the trajectory of the conversation, the voices present and absent, and the contingency of theory, rather than any definitive agreement on any of the propositions, which are actually provocations

Database architecture evolution: Mammals flourished long before dinosaurs became extinct

The holy grail for database architecture research is to find a solution that is Scalable & Speedy, to run on anything from small ARM processors up to globally distributed compute clusters, Stable & Secure, to service a broad user community, Small & Simple, to be comprehensible to a small team of programmers, Self-managing, to let it run out-of-the-box without hassle. In this paper, we provide a trip report on this quest, covering both past experiences, ongoing research on hardware-conscious algorithms, and novel ways towards self-management specifically focused on column store solutions