10381 Summary and Abstracts Collection -- Robust Query Processing

Dagstuhl seminar 10381 on robust query processing (held 19.09.10 - 24.09.10) brought together a diverse set of researchers and practitioners with a broad range of expertise for the purpose of fostering discussion and collaboration regarding causes, opportunities, and solutions for achieving robust query processing. The seminar strove to build a unified view across the loosely-coupled system components responsible for the various stages of database query processing. Participants were chosen for their experience with database query processing and, where possible, their prior work in academic research or in product development towards robustness in database query processing. In order to pave the way to motivate, measure, and protect future advances in robust query processing, seminar 10381 focused on developing tests for measuring the robustness of query processing. In these proceedings, we first review the seminar topics, goals, and results, then present abstracts or notes of some of the seminar break-out sessions. We also include, as an appendix, the robust query processing reading list that was collected and distributed to participants before the seminar began, as well as summaries of a few of those papers that were contributed by some participants

Query processing of spatial objects: Complexity versus Redundancy

The management of complex spatial objects in applications, such as geography and cartography, imposes stringent new requirements on spatial database systems, in particular on efficient query processing. As shown before, the performance of spatial query processing can be improved by decomposing complex spatial objects into simple components. Up to now, only decomposition techniques generating a linear number of very simple components, e.g. triangles or trapezoids, have been considered. In this paper, we will investigate the natural trade-off between the complexity of the components and the redundancy, i.e. the number of components, with respect to its effect on efficient query processing. In particular, we present two new decomposition methods generating a better balance between the complexity and the number of components than previously known techniques. We compare these new decomposition methods to the traditional undecomposed representation as well as to the well-known decomposition into convex polygons with respect to their performance in spatial query processing. This comparison points out that for a wide range of query selectivity the new decomposition techniques clearly outperform both the undecomposed representation and the convex decomposition method. More important than the absolute gain in performance by a factor of up to an order of magnitude is the robust performance of our new decomposition techniques over the whole range of query selectivity

Robust query processing for linked data fragments

Linked Data Fragments (LDFs) refer to interfaces that allow for publishing and querying Knowledge Graphs on the Web. These interfaces primarily differ in their expressivity and allow for exploring different trade-offs when balancing the workload between clients and servers in decentralized SPARQL query processing. To devise efficient query plans, clients typically rely on heuristics that leverage the metadata provided by the LDF interface, since obtaining fine-grained statistics from remote sources is a challenging task. However, these heuristics are prone to potential estimation errors based on the metadata which can lead to inefficient query executions with a high number of requests, large amounts of data transferred, and, consequently, excessive execution times. In this work, we investigate robust query processing techniques for Linked Data Fragment clients to address these challenges. We first focus on robust plan selection by proposing CROP, a query plan optimizer that explores the cost and robustness of alternative query plans. Then, we address robust query execution by proposing a new class of adaptive operators: Polymorphic Join Operators. These operators adapt their join strategy in response to possible cardinality estimation errors. The results of our first experimental study show that CROP outperforms state-of-the-art clients by exploring alternative plans based on their cost and robustness. In our second experimental study, we investigate how different planning approaches can benefit from polymorphic join operators and find that they enable more efficient query execution in the majority of cases

Robust Real-time Query Processing with QStream

Processing data streams with Quality-of-Service (QoS) guarantees is an emerging area in existing streaming applications. Although it is possible to negotiate the result quality and to reserve the required processing resources in advance, it remains a challenge to adapt the DSMS to data stream characteristics which are not known in advance or are difficult to obtain. Within this paper we present the second generation of our QStream DSMS which addresses the above challenge by using a real-time capable operating system environment for resource reservation and by applying an adaptation mechanism if the data stream characteristics change spontaneously

Spoken query processing for interactive information retrieval

It has long been recognised that interactivity improves the effectiveness of information retrieval systems. Speech is the most natural and interactive medium of communication and recent progress in speech recognition is making it possible to build systems that interact with the user via speech. However, given the typical length of queries submitted to information retrieval systems, it is easy to imagine that the effects of word recognition errors in spoken queries must be severely destructive on the system's effectiveness. The experimental work reported in this paper shows that the use of classical information retrieval techniques for spoken query processing is robust to considerably high levels of word recognition errors, in particular for long queries. Moreover, in the case of short queries, both standard relevance feedback and pseudo relevance feedback can be effectively employed to improve the effectiveness of spoken query processing