17 research outputs found
Snapshot Semantics for Temporal Multiset Relations (Extended Version)
Snapshot semantics is widely used for evaluating queries over temporal data:
temporal relations are seen as sequences of snapshot relations, and queries are
evaluated at each snapshot. In this work, we demonstrate that current
approaches for snapshot semantics over interval-timestamped multiset relations
are subject to two bugs regarding snapshot aggregation and bag difference. We
introduce a novel temporal data model based on K-relations that overcomes these
bugs and prove it to correctly encode snapshot semantics. Furthermore, we
present an efficient implementation of our model as a database middleware and
demonstrate experimentally that our approach is competitive with native
implementations and significantly outperforms such implementations on queries
that involve aggregation.Comment: extended version of PVLDB pape
Tunneling and Energy Splitting in Ising Models
The energy splitting in two and four dimensional Ising models is
measured in a cylindrical geometry on finite lattices. By comparing to exact
results in the two dimensional Ising model we demonstrate that can be
extracted very reliably from Monte Carlo calculations in practice. In four
dimensions we compare the measured with two different theoretical
predictions on the finite size behavior of the energy splitting. We find that
our numerical data are in favor of the predictions based on the semiclassical
dilute instanton gas approximation.Comment: 11p
Taste symmetry breaking with HYP-smeared staggered fermions
We study the impact of hypercubic (HYP) smearing on the size of taste
breaking for staggered fermions, comparing to unimproved and to asqtad-improved
staggered fermions. As in previous studies, we find a substantial reduction in
taste-breaking compared to unimproved staggered fermions (by a factor of 4-7 on
lattices with spacing fm). In addition, we observe that
discretization effects of next-to-leading order in the chiral expansion () are markedly reduced by HYP smearing. Compared to asqtad valence
fermions, we find that taste-breaking in the pion spectrum is reduced by a
factor of 2.5-3, down to a level comparable to the expected size of generic
effects. Our results suggest that, once one reaches a lattice
spacing of fm, taste-breaking will be small enough after HYP
smearing that one can use a modified power counting in which , simplify fitting to phenomenologically interesting quantities.Comment: 14 pages, 13 figures, references updated, minor change
On the Semantics of "Now" in Databases
While "now" is expressed in SQL as CURRENT-TIMESTAMP within queries, this value cannot be
stored in the database. However, this notion of an ever-increasing current-time value has been
reflected in some temporal data models by inclusion of database-resident variables, such as
"now," "until-changed," "â," "@" and "-." Time variables are very desirable, but their use
also leads to a new type of database, consisting of tuples with variables, termed a variable
database.
This paper proposes a framework for defining the semantics of the variable databases of temporal
relational data models. A framework is presented because several reasonable meanings
may be given to databases that use some of the specific temporal variables that have appeared
in the literature. Using the framework, the paper defines a useful semantics for such databases.
Because situations occur where the existing time variables are inadequate, two new types of
modeling entities that address these shortcomings, timestamps which we call now-relative and
now-relative indeterminate, are introduced and defined within the framework. Moreover, the paper
provides a foundation, using algebraic bind operators, for the querying of variable databases
via existing query languages. This transition to variable databases presented here requires minimal
change to the query processor. Finally, to underline the practical feasibility of variable
databases, we show that database variables can be precisely specified and efficiently implemented
in conventional query languages, such as SQL, and in temporal query languages, such
as TSQL2.Information Systems Working Papers Serie
Temporal JSON
JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) is a format for representing data. In this thesis we show how to capture the history of changes to a JSON document. Capturing the history is important in many applications, where not only the current version of a document is required, but all the previous versions. Conceptually the history can be thought of as a sequence of non-temporal JSON documents, one for each instant of time. Each document in the sequence is called a snapshot. Since changes to a document are few and infrequent, the sequence of snapshots largely duplicates a document across many time instants, so the snapshot model is (wildly) inefficient in terms of space needed to represent the history and time taken to navigate within it. A more efficient representation can be achieved by “gluing the snapshots together to form a temporal model. Data that remains unchanged across snapshots is represented only once in a temporal model. But we show that the temporal model is not a JSON document, and it is important to represent a history as JSON to ensure compatibility with web services and scripting languages that use JSON. So we describe a representational model that captures the information in a temporal model. We implement the representational model in Python and extensively experiment with the model. Our experiments show that the model is efficient
ON THE SEMANTICS OF TRANSACTION TIME AND VALID TIME IN BITEMPORAL DATABASES
Numerous proposals for extending the relational data model to incorporate the temporal
dimension of data have appeared in the past several years. While most of these
have been historical databases, incorporating in some fashion a valid time dimension
to the data model and the query languages, others have been rollback databases, incorporating
a transaction time dimension, or bitemporal databases, incorporating both of
these temporal dimensions. In this paper we address an issue that has been lacking in
many of these papers, namely, a formal specification of the precise semantics of these
temporal dimensions of data. We introduce the notion of reference time - the time
that any operation is applied to the database state - and provide a logical analysis
of the interrelationships among these three temporal dimensions. We also provide an
analysis of the meaning of various variables such as now and â which have been used
in many of these models without a complete specification of their semantics.Information Systems Working Papers Serie
Lineage-Aware Temporal Windows: Supporting Set Operations in Temporal-Probabilistic Databases
In temporal-probabilistic (TP) databases, the combination of the temporal and
the probabilistic dimension adds significant overhead to the computation of set
operations. Although set queries are guaranteed to yield linearly sized output
relations, existing solutions exhibit quadratic runtime complexity. They suffer
from redundant interval comparisons and additional joins for the formation of
lineage expressions. In this paper, we formally define the semantics of set
operations in TP databases and study their properties. For their efficient
computation, we introduce the lineage-aware temporal window, a mechanism that
directly binds intervals with lineage expressions. We suggest the lineage-aware
window advancer (LAWA) for producing the windows of two TP relations in
linearithmic time, and we implement all TP set operations based on LAWA. By
exploiting the flexibility of lineage-aware temporal windows, we perform direct
filtering of irrelevant intervals and finalization of output lineage
expressions and thus guarantee that no additional computational cost or buffer
space is needed. A series of experiments over both synthetic and real-world
datasets show that (a) our approach has predictable performance, depending only
on the input size and not on the number of time intervals per fact or their
overlap, and that (b) it outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in both
temporal and probabilistic databases