206636218
A Comparison between Deductive and Object-Oriented Database Systems
The author will not pretend to be unbiased in the matter of comparing the deductive and object-oriented approaches to new database systems; he believes that despite some important concepts originating with the object-oriented approach, the deductive family of systems will ultimately dominate. We shall explore some of the reasons why the two approaches do not mix well. Fortunately, most of the features of object-oriented database systems can be incorporated in deductive systems (but not vice-versa). Then we argue that declarativeness is important for at least some of the new applications, and that declarative languages cannot be object-oriented in a nontrivial way. We next contrast the approaches with regard to the way they classify data elements. We close with an examination of the prospects for “classless” data, which is motivated by the prospect of databases where the number of distinct classes would be too large to name systematically. There are a number of challenges to implementing such facilities in either paradigm, and we propose some appropriate research questions.
6212306
Constraint checking with partial information
Constraints are a valuable tool for managing information across multiple databases, as well as for general purposes of assuring data integrity. However, efficient implementation of constraint checking is difficult. In this paper we explore techniques for assuring constraint satisfaction without performing a complete evaluation of the constraints. We consider methods that use only constraint definitions, methods that use constraints and updates, and methods that use constraints, updates, and “local” data.
5323612
A Query Translation Scheme for Rapid Implementation of Wrappers
Wrappers provide access to heterogeneous information sources by converting application queries into source specific queries or commands. In this paper we present a wrapper implementation toolkit that facilitates rapid development of wrappers. We focus on the query translation component of the toolkit, called the converter. The converter takes as input a Query Description and Translation Language (QDTL) description of the queries that can be processed by the underlying source. Based on this the converter decides if an application query is (a) directly supported, i.e., it can be translated to a query of the underlying system following instructions in the QDTL description; (b) logically supported, i.e., logically equivalent to a directly supported query; (c) indirectly supported, i.e., it can be computed by applying a filter, automatically generated by the converter, to the result of a directly supported query.
15385590
Dynamic itemset counting and implication rules for market basket data
We consider the problem of analyzing market-basket data and present several important contributions. First, we present a new algorithm for finding large itemsets which uses fewer passes over the data than classic algorithms, and yet uses fewer candidate itemsets than methods based on sampling. We investigate the idea of item reordering, which can improve the low-level efficiency of the algorithm. Second, we present a new way of generating “implication rules,” which are normalized based on both the antecedent and the consequent and are truly implications (not simply a measure of co-occurrence), and we show how they produce more intuitive results than other methods. Finally, we show how different characteristics of real data, as opposed by synthetic data, can dramatically affect the performance of the system and the form of the results.
208920048
Integrating Information by Outerjoins and Full Disjunctions.
Our motivation is the piecing together of tidbits of information found on the "web" into a usable information structure. The problem is related to that of computing the natural outerjoin of many relations in a way that preserves all possible connections among facts. Such a computation has been termed a "full disjunction" by Galindo-Legaria. We are thus led to ask the question of when a full disjunction can be computed by some sequence of natural outerjoins. The answer involves a concept of from Fagin [1983] called fl-acyclic hypergraphs." We prove that there is a natural outerjoin sequence producing the full disjunction if and only if the set of relation schemes forms a connected, fl-acyclic hypergraph.
9277235
Index selection for OLAP
On-line analytical processing (OLAP) is a recent and important application of database systems. Typically, OLAP data is presented as a multidimensional "data cube." OLAP queries are complex and can take many hours or even days to run, if executed directly on the raw data. The most common method of reducing execution time is to precompute some of the queries into summary tables (subcubes of the data cube) and then to build indexes on these summary tables. In most commercial OLAP systems today, the summary tables that are to be precomputed are picked first, followed by the selection of the appropriate indexes on them. A trial-and-error approach is used to divide the space available between the summary tables and the indexes. This two-step process can perform very poorly. Since both summary tables and indexes consume the same resource-space-their selection should be done together for the most efficient use of space. The authors give algorithms that automate the selection of summary tables and indexes. In particular, they present a family of algorithms of increasing time complexities, and prove strong performance bounds for them. The algorithms with higher complexities have better performance bounds. However, the increase in the performance bound is diminishing, and they show that an algorithm of moderate complexity can perform fairly close to the optimal.
209399085
Answering Queries Using Limited External Processors.