Optimizing cursor movement in holistic twig joins

Holistic twig join algorithms represent the state of the art for evaluating path expressions in XML queries. Using inverted in-dexes on XML elements, holistic twig joins move a set of index cursors in a coordinated way to quickly ¯nd structural matches. Because each cursor move can trigger I/O, the performance of a holistic twig join is largely determined by how many cursor moves it makes, yet, surprisingly, existing join algorithms have not been optimized along these lines. In this paper, we describe TwigOptimal, a new holistic twig join algorithm with optimal cur-sor movement. We sketch the proof of TwigOptimal's optimality, and describe how TwigOptimal can use information in the return clause of XQuery to boost its performance. Finally, experimen-tal results are presented, showing TwigOptimal's superiority over existing holistic twig join algorithms

Impliance: A Next Generation Information Management Appliance

ably successful in building a large market and adapting to the changes of the last three decades, its impact on the broader market of information management is surprisingly limited. If we were to design an information management system from scratch, based upon today's requirements and hardware capabilities, would it look anything like today's database systems?" In this paper, we introduce Impliance, a next-generation information management system consisting of hardware and software components integrated to form an easy-to-administer appliance that can store, retrieve, and analyze all types of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured information. We first summarize the trends that will shape information management for the foreseeable future. Those trends imply three major requirements for Impliance: (1) to be able to store, manage, and uniformly query all data, not just structured records; (2) to be able to scale out as the volume of this data grows; and (3) to be simple and robust in operation. We then describe four key ideas that are uniquely combined in Impliance to address these requirements, namely the ideas of: (a) integrating software and off-the-shelf hardware into a generic information appliance; (b) automatically discovering, organizing, and managing all data - unstructured as well as structured - in a uniform way; (c) achieving scale-out by exploiting simple, massive parallel processing, and (d) virtualizing compute and storage resources to unify, simplify, and streamline the management of Impliance. Impliance is an ambitious, long-term effort to define simpler, more robust, and more scalable information systems for tomorrow's enterprises.Comment: This article is published under a Creative Commons License Agreement (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/.) You may copy, distribute, display, and perform the work, make derivative works and make commercial use of the work, but, you must attribute the work to the author and CIDR 2007. 3rd Biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR) January 710, 2007, Asilomar, California, US

Child Prime Label Approaches to Evaluate XML Structured Queries

The adoption of the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) as the standard format to store and exchange semi-structure data has been gaining momentum. The growing number of XML documents leads to the need for appropriate XML querying algorithms which are able to retrieve XML data efficiently. Due to the importance of twig pattern matching in XML retrieval systems, finding all matching occurrences of a tree pattern query in an XML document is often considered as a specific task for XML databases as well as a core operation in XML query processing. This thesis presents a design and implementation of a new indexing technique, called the Child Prime Label (CPL) which exploits the property of prime numbers to identify Parent-Child (P-C) edges in twig pattern queries (TPQs) during query evaluation. The CPL approach can be incorporated efficiently within the existing labelling schemes. The major contributions of this thesis can be seen as a set of novel twig matching algorithms which apply the CPL approach and focus on reducing the overhead of storing useless elements and performing unnecessary computations during the output enumeration. The research presented here is the first to provide an efficient and general solution for TPQs containing ordering constraints and positional predicates specified by the XML query languages. To evaluate the CPL approaches, the holistic model was implemented as an experimental prototype in which the approaches proposed are compared against state-of-the-art holistic twig algorithms. Extensive performance studies on various real-world and artificial datasets were conducted to demonstrate the significant improvement of the CPL approaches over the previous indexing and querying methods. The experimental results demonstrate the validity and improvements of the new algorithms over other related methods on common various subclasses of TPQs. Moreover, the scalability tests reveal that the new algorithms are more suitable for processing large XML datasets

Semantics and efficient evaluation of partial tree-pattern queries on XML

Current applications export and exchange XML data on the web. Usually, XML data are queried using keyword queries or using the standard structured query language XQuery the core of which consists of the navigational query language XPath. In this context, one major challenge is the querying of the data when the structure of the data sources is complex or not fully known to the user. Another challenge is the integration of multiple data sources that export data with structural differences and irregularities. In this dissertation, a query language for XML called Partial Tree-Pattern Query (PTPQ) language is considered. PTPQs generalize and strictly contain Tree-Pattern Queries (TPQs) and can express a broad structural fragment of XPath. Because of their expressive power and flexibility, they are useful for querying XML documents the structure of which is complex or not fully known to the user, and for integrating XML data sources with different structures. The dissertation focuses on three issues. The first one is the design of efficient non-main-memory evaluation methods for PTPQs. The second one is the assignment of semantics to PTPQs so that they return meaningful answers. The third one is the development of techniques for answering TPQs using materialized views. Non-main-memory XML query evaluation can be done in two modes (which also define two evaluation models). In the first mode, data is preprocessed and indexes, called inverted lists, are built for it. In the second mode, data are unindexed and arrives continuously in the form of a stream. Existing algorithms cannot be used directly or indirectly to efficiently compute PTPQs in either mode. Initially, the problem of efficiently evaluating partial path queries in the inverted lists model has been addressed. Partial path queries form a subclass of PTPQs which is not contained in the class of TPQs. Three novel algorithms for evaluating partial path queries including a holistic one have been designed. The analytical and experimental results show that the holistic algorithm outperforms the other two. These results have been extended into holistic and non-holistic approaches for PTPQs in the inverted lists model. The experiments show again the superiority of the holistic approach. The dissertation has also addressed the problem of evaluating PTPQs in the streaming model, and two original efficient streaming algorithms for PTPQs have been designed. Compared to the only known streaming algorithm that supports an extension of TPQs, the experimental results show that the proposed algorithms perform better by orders of magnitude while consuming a much smaller fraction of memory space. An original approach for assigning semantics to PTPQs has also been devised. The novel semantics seamlessly applies to keyword queries and to queries with structural restrictions. In contrast to previous approaches that operate locally on data, the proposed approach operates globally on structural summaries of data to extract tree patterns. Compared to previous approaches, an experimental evaluation shows that our approach has a perfect recall both for XML documents with complete and with incomplete data. It also shows better precision compared to approaches with similar recall. Finally, the dissertation has addressed the problem of answering XML queries using exclusively materialized views. An original approach for materializing views in the context of the inverted lists model has been suggested. Necessary and sufficient conditions have been provided for tree-pattern query answerability in terms of view-to-query homomorphisms. A time and space efficient algorithm was designed for deciding query answerability and a technique for computing queries over view materializations using stack- based holistic algorithms was developed. Further, optimizations were developed which (a) minimize the storage space and avoid redundancy by materializing views as bitmaps, and (b) optimize the evaluation of the queries over the views by applying bitwise operations on view materializations. The experimental results show that the proposed approach obtains largely higher hit rates than previous approaches, speeds up significantly the evaluation of queries without using views, and scales very smoothly in terms of storage space and computational overhead

Implementation of Web Query Languages Reconsidered

Visions of the next generation Web such as the "Semantic Web" or the "Web 2.0" have triggered the emergence of a multitude of data formats. These formats have different characteristics as far as the shape of data is concerned (for example tree- vs. graph-shaped). They are accompanied by a puzzlingly large number of query languages each limited to one data format. Thus, a key feature of the Web, namely to make it possible to access anything published by anyone, is compromised. This thesis is devoted to versatile query languages capable of accessing data in a variety of Web formats. The issue is addressed from three angles: language design, common, yet uniform semantics, and common, yet uniform evaluation. % Thus it is divided in three parts: First, we consider the query language Xcerpt as an example of the advocated class of versatile Web query languages. Using this concrete exemplar allows us to clarify and discuss the vision of versatility in detail. Second, a number of query languages, XPath, XQuery, SPARQL, and Xcerpt, are translated into a common intermediary language, CIQLog. This language has a purely logical semantics, which makes it easily amenable to optimizations. As a side effect, this provides the, to the best of our knowledge, first logical semantics for XQuery and SPARQL. It is a very useful tool for understanding the commonalities and differences of the considered languages. Third, the intermediate logical language is translated into a query algebra, CIQCAG. The core feature of CIQCAG is that it scales from tree- to graph-shaped data and queries without efficiency losses when tree-data and -queries are considered: it is shown that, in these cases, optimal complexities are achieved. CIQCAG is also shown to evaluate each of the aforementioned query languages with a complexity at least as good as the best known evaluation methods so far. For example, navigational XPath is evaluated with space complexity O(q d) and time complexity O(q n) where q is the query size, n the data size, and d the depth of the (tree-shaped) data. CIQCAG is further shown to provide linear time and space evaluation of tree-shaped queries for a larger class of graph-shaped data than any method previously proposed. This larger class of graph-shaped data, called continuous-image graphs, short CIGs, is introduced for the first time in this thesis. A (directed) graph is a CIG if its nodes can be totally ordered in such a manner that, for this order, the children of any node form a continuous interval. CIQCAG achieves these properties by employing a novel data structure, called sequence map, that allows an efficient evaluation of tree-shaped queries, or of tree-shaped cores of graph-shaped queries on any graph-shaped data. While being ideally suited to trees and CIGs, the data structure gracefully degrades to unrestricted graphs. It yields a remarkably efficient evaluation on graph-shaped data that only a few edges prevent from being trees or CIGs

Updates

Richard Bud Meade worked in Human Resources at the College at Brockport from 1968-2000. He knew many of our faculty and staff and in retirement he began to circulate an email newsletter which passed on stories and news about various college retirees. This remarkable, ongoing project has captured a tremendous amount of information about the folks who built the college over the last 50 years. This collection of his Update is searchable, and covers from the beginning in 2001 up to August, 2020. More will be added as time goes on..