Efficient & Effective Selective Query Rewriting with Efficiency Predictions

To enhance effectiveness, a user's query can be rewritten internally by the search engine in many ways, for example by applying proximity, or by expanding the query with related terms. However, approaches that benefit effectiveness often have a negative impact on efficiency, which has impacts upon the user satisfaction, if the query is excessively slow. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for using the predicted execution time of various query rewritings to select between alternatives on a per-query basis, in a manner that ensures both effectiveness and efficiency. In particular, we propose the prediction of the execution time of ephemeral (e.g., proximity) posting lists generated from uni-gram inverted index posting lists, which are used in establishing the permissible query rewriting alternatives that may execute in the allowed time. Experiments examining both the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach demonstrate that a 49% decrease in mean response time (and 62% decrease in 95th-percentile response time) can be attained without significantly hindering the effectiveness of the search engine

Optimizing Federated Queries Based on the Physical Design of a Data Lake

The optimization of query execution plans is known to be crucial for reducing the query execution time. In particular, query optimization has been studied thoroughly for relational databases over the past decades. Recently, the Resource Description Framework (RDF) became popular for publishing data on the Web. As a consequence, federations composed of different data models like RDF and relational databases evolved. One type of these federations are Semantic Data Lakes where every data source is kept in its original data model and semantically annotated with ontologies or controlled vocabularies. However, state-of-the-art query engines for federated query processing over Semantic Data Lakes often rely on optimization techniques tailored for RDF. In this paper, we present query optimization techniques guided by heuristics that take the physical design of a Data Lake into account. The heuristics are implemented on top of Ontario, a SPARQL query engine for Semantic Data Lakes. Using sourcespecific heuristics, the query engine is able to generate more efficient query execution plans by exploiting the knowledge about indexes and normalization in relational databases. We show that heuristics which take the physical design of the Data Lake into account are able to speed up query processing

Knowledge-infused and Consistent Complex Event Processing over Real-time and Persistent Streams

Emerging applications in Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) present novel challenges to Big Data platforms for performing online analytics. Ubiquitous sensors from IoT deployments are able to generate data streams at high velocity, that include information from a variety of domains, and accumulate to large volumes on disk. Complex Event Processing (CEP) is recognized as an important real-time computing paradigm for analyzing continuous data streams. However, existing work on CEP is largely limited to relational query processing, exposing two distinctive gaps for query specification and execution: (1) infusing the relational query model with higher level knowledge semantics, and (2) seamless query evaluation across temporal spaces that span past, present and future events. These allow accessible analytics over data streams having properties from different disciplines, and help span the velocity (real-time) and volume (persistent) dimensions. In this article, we introduce a Knowledge-infused CEP (X-CEP) framework that provides domain-aware knowledge query constructs along with temporal operators that allow end-to-end queries to span across real-time and persistent streams. We translate this query model to efficient query execution over online and offline data streams, proposing several optimizations to mitigate the overheads introduced by evaluating semantic predicates and in accessing high-volume historic data streams. The proposed X-CEP query model and execution approaches are implemented in our prototype semantic CEP engine, SCEPter. We validate our query model using domain-aware CEP queries from a real-world Smart Power Grid application, and experimentally analyze the benefits of our optimizations for executing these queries, using event streams from a campus-microgrid IoT deployment.Comment: 34 pages, 16 figures, accepted in Future Generation Computer Systems, October 27, 201

Measuring and Managing Answer Quality for Online Data-Intensive Services

Online data-intensive services parallelize query execution across distributed software components. Interactive response time is a priority, so online query executions return answers without waiting for slow running components to finish. However, data from these slow components could lead to better answers. We propose Ubora, an approach to measure the effect of slow running components on the quality of answers. Ubora randomly samples online queries and executes them twice. The first execution elides data from slow components and provides fast online answers; the second execution waits for all components to complete. Ubora uses memoization to speed up mature executions by replaying network messages exchanged between components. Our systems-level implementation works for a wide range of platforms, including Hadoop/Yarn, Apache Lucene, the EasyRec Recommendation Engine, and the OpenEphyra question answering system. Ubora computes answer quality much faster than competing approaches that do not use memoization. With Ubora, we show that answer quality can and should be used to guide online admission control. Our adaptive controller processed 37% more queries than a competing controller guided by the rate of timeouts.Comment: Technical Repor

A Delta Debugger for ILP Query Execution

Because query execution is the most crucial part of Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) algorithms, a lot of effort is invested in developing faster execution mechanisms. These execution mechanisms typically have a low-level implementation, making them hard to debug. Moreover, other factors such as the complexity of the problems handled by ILP algorithms and size of the code base of ILP data mining systems make debugging at this level a very difficult job. In this work, we present the trace-based debugging approach currently used in the development of new execution mechanisms in hipP, the engine underlying the ACE Data Mining system. This debugger uses the delta debugging algorithm to automatically reduce the total time needed to expose bugs in ILP execution, thus making manual debugging step much lighter.Comment: Paper presented at the 16th Workshop on Logic-based Methods in Programming Environments (WLPE2006

Pattern based processing of XPath queries

As the popularity of areas including document storage and distributed systems continues to grow, the demand for high performance XML databases is increasingly evident. This has led to a number of research eorts aimed at exploiting the maturity of relational database systems in order to in- crease XML query performance. In our approach, we use an index structure based on a metamodel for XML databases combined with relational database technology to facilitate fast access to XML document elements. The query process involves transforming XPath expressions to SQL which can be executed over our optimised query engine. As there are many dierent types of XPath queries, varying processing logic may be applied to boost performance not only to indi- vidual XPath axes, but across multiple axes simultaneously. This paper describes a pattern based approach to XPath query processing, which permits the execution of a group of XPath location steps in parallel