Case report on splenic abscess with pleural effusion caused by enteric fever

Splenic abscess is an infrequent complication of enteric fever caused by Salmonella typhi. The incidence rate ranges from 0.14-2%. Clinical manifestations are often nonspecific and may be presented as fever with left upper quadrant abdominal pain and a palpable tender mass. Diagnosis is often difficult and splenic abscess management is based on surgical interventions and antibiotic therapy. In this case report we would like to highlight splenic abscess with left reactive pleural effusion as a rare complication of Salmonella typhi infection

Oracle Database 10g: a platform for BLAST search and Regular Expression pattern matching in life sciences

As database management systems expand their array of analytical functionality, they become powerful research engines for biomedical data analysis and drug discovery. Databases can hold most of the data types commonly required in life sciences and consequently can be used as flexible platforms for the implementation of knowledgebases. Performing data analysis in the database simplifies data management by minimizing the movement of data from disks to memory, allowing pre-filtering and post-processing of datasets, and enabling data to remain in a secure, highly available environment. This article describes the Oracle Database 10g implementation of BLAST and Regular Expression Searches and provides case studies of their usage in bioinformatics. http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/index.htm

Design Issues for Extensible Concurrency Control Mechanisms

Relational database management systems lack the requisite support for specialized applications such as engineering databases, electronic design databases, geographic databases, etc. Extensible database management systems attempt to fill this void by providing capabilities to define query language extensions and specialized storage structures that suit the particular application. However, they do not provide for having multiple concurrency control policies operating simultaneously. This feature appears useful for multi-application workloads since it would be best, from a performance viewpoint, if each application operated under its favourite concurrency control algorithm. The problem, however, is to maintain database integrity in this environment. In this paper, we address the issue of designing mechanisms that allow extensible database systems to simultaneously operate multiple concurrency control policies without loss of data integrity. The key properties of such a mechanism are: Firs..

Mining Generalized Association Rules and Sequential Patterns Using SQL Queries

Database integration of mining is becoming increasingly important with the installation of larger and larger data warehouses built around relational database technology. Most of the commercially available mining systems integrate loosely (typically, through an ODBC or SQL cursor interface) with data stored in DBMSs. In cases where the mining algorithm makes multiple passes over the data, it is also possible to cache the data in at les rather than retrieve multiple times from the DBMS, to achieve better performance. Recent studies have found that for association rule mining, with carefully tuned SQL formulations it is possible to achieve performance comparable to systems that cache the data in les outside the DBMS. The SQL implementation has potential for oering other qualitative advantages like automatic parallelization, development ease, portability and inter-operability with relational operators. In this paper, we present several alternatives for formulating as ..

Abstract Integrating Association Rule Mining with Relational Database Systems: Alternatives and Implications

Data mining on large data warehouses is becoming increas-ingly important. In support of this trend, we consider a spectrum of architectural alternatives for coupling mining with database systems. These alternatives include: loose-coupling through a SQL cursor interface; encapsulation of a mining algorithm in a stored procedure; caching the data to a file system on-the-fly and mining; tight-coupling using pri-marily user-defined functions; and SQL implementations for processing in the DBMS. We comprehensively study the op-tion of expressing the mining algorithm in the form of SQL queries using Association rule mining as a case in point. We consider four options in SQL-92 and six options in SQL enhanced with object-relational extensions (SQL-OR). Our evaluation of the different architectural alternatives shows that from a performance perspective, the Cache-Mine option is superior, although the performance of the SQL-OR option is within a factor of two. Both the Cache-Mine and the SQL-OR approaches incur a higher storage penalty than the loose-coupling approach which performance-wise is a factor of 3 to 4 worse than Cache-Mine. The SQL-92 implemen-tations were too slow to qualify as a competitive option. We also compare these alternatives on the basis of qualita-tive factors like automatic parallelization, development ease, portability and inter-operability.