Query Processing Over Incomplete Databases

Incomplete data is part of life and almost all areas of scientific studies. Users tend to skip certain fields when they fill out online forms; participants choose to ignore sensitive questions on surveys; sensors fail, resulting in the loss of certain readings; publicly viewable satellite map services have missing data in many mobile applications; and in privacy-preserving applications, the data is incomplete deliberately in order to preserve the sensitivity of some attribute values. Query processing is a fundamental problem in computer science, and is useful in a variety of applications. In this book, we mostly focus on the query processing over incomplete databases, which involves finding a set of qualified objects from a specified incomplete dataset in order to support a wide spectrum of real-life applications. We first elaborate the three general kinds of methods of handling incomplete data, including (i) discarding the data with missing values, (ii) imputation for the missing values, and (iii) just depending on the observed data values. For the third method type, we introduce the semantics of k-nearest neighbor (kNN) search, skyline query, and top-k dominating query on incomplete data, respectively. In terms of the three representative queries over incomplete data, we investigate some advanced techniques to process incomplete data queries, including indexing, pruning as well as crowdsourcing techniques.

Incomplete data is part of life and almost all areas of scientific studies. Users tend to skip certain fields when they fill out online forms; participants choose to ignore sensitive questions on surveys; sensors fail, resulting in the loss of certain readings; publicly viewable satellite map services have missing data in many mobile applications; and in privacy-preserving applications, the data is incomplete deliberately in order to preserve the sensitivity of some attribute values. Query processing is a fundamental problem in computer science, and is useful in a variety of applications. In this book, we mostly focus on the query processing over incomplete databases, which involves finding a set of qualified objects from a specified incomplete dataset in order to support a wide spectrum of real-life applications. We first elaborate the three general kinds of methods of handling incomplete data, including (i) discarding the data with missing values, (ii) imputation for the missing values, and (iii) just depending on the observed data values. For the third method type, we introduce the semantics of k-nearest neighbor (kNN) search, skyline query, and top-k dominating query on incomplete data, respectively. In terms of the three representative queries over incomplete data, we investigate some advanced techniques to process incomplete data queries, including indexing, pruning as well as crowdsourcing techniques.

This book is an anthology of the results of research and development in database query processing during the past decade. The relational model of data provided tremendous impetus for research into query processing. Since a relational query does not specify access paths to the stored data, the database management system (DBMS) must provide an intelligent query-processing subsystem which will evaluate a number of potentially efficient strategies for processing the query and select the one that optimizes a given performance measure. The degree of sophistication of this subsystem, often called the optimizer, critically affects the performance of the DBMS. Research into query processing thus started has taken off in several directions during the past decade. The emergence of research into distributed databases has enormously complicated the tasks of the optimizer. In a distributed environment, the database may be partitioned into horizontal or vertical fragments of relations. Replicas of the fragments may be stored in different sites of a network and even migrate to other sites. The measure of performance of a query in a distributed system must include the communication cost between sites. To minimize communication costs for-queries involving multiple relations across multiple sites, optimizers may also have to consider semi-join techniques.

Due to measurement errors, transmission lost, or injected noise for privacy protection, uncertainty exists in the data of many real applications. However, query processing techniques for deterministic data cannot be directly applied to uncertain data because they do not have mechanisms to handle data uncertainty. Therefore, efficient and effective manipulation of uncertain data is a practical yet challenging research topic. In this book, we start from the data models for imprecise and uncertain data, move on to defining different semantics for queries on uncertain data, and finally discuss the advanced query processing techniques for various probabilistic queries in uncertain databases. The book serves as a comprehensive guideline for query processing over uncertain databases.

Text data that is associated with location data has become ubiquitous. A tweet is an example of this type of data, where the text in a tweet is associated with the location where the tweet has been issued. We use the term spatial-keyword data to refer to this type of data. Spatial-keyword data is being generated at massive scale. Almost all online transactions have an associated spatial trace. The spatial trace is derived from GPS coordinates, IP addresses, or cell-phone-tower locations. Hundreds of millions or even billions of spatial-keyword objects are being generated daily. Spatial-keyword data has numerous applications that require efficient processing and management of massive amounts of spatial-keyword data. This book starts by overviewing some important applications of spatial-keyword data, and demonstrates the scale at which spatial-keyword data is being generated. Then, it formalizes and classifies the various types of queries that execute over spatial-keyword data. Next, it discusses important and desirable properties of spatial-keyword query languages that are needed to express queries over spatial-keyword data. As will be illustrated, existing spatial-keyword query languages vary in the types of spatial-keyword queries that they can support. There are many systems that process spatial-keyword queries. Systems differ from each other in various aspects, e.g., whether the system is batch-oriented or stream-based, and whether the system is centralized or distributed. Moreover, spatial-keyword systems vary in the types of queries that they support. Finally, systems vary in the types of indexing techniques that they adopt. This book provides an overview of the main spatial-keyword data-management systems (SKDMSs), and classifies them according to their features. Moreover, the book describes the main approaches adopted when indexing spatial-keyword data in the centralized and distributed settings. Several case studies of {SKDMSs} are presented along with the applications and query types that these {SKDMSs} are targeted for and the indexing techniques they utilize for processing their queries. Optimizing the performance and the query processing of {SKDMSs} still has many research challenges and open problems. The book concludes with a discussion about several important and open research-problems in the domain of scalable spatial-keyword processing.

This volume is a progress report on the project Research and Development of Advanced Database Systems for Integration of Media and User Environments, supported by the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports and Culture of Japan. It investigates research on new database systems due to the recent development of network technology; a clearer picture of integration by database technology is drawn as a result.

The last decade has brought groundbreaking developments in transaction processing. This resurgence of an otherwise mature research area has spurred from the diminishing cost per GB of DRAM that allows many transaction processing workloads to be entirely memory-resident. This shift demanded a pause to fundamentally rethink the architecture of database systems. The data storage lexicon has now expanded beyond spinning disks and RAID levels to include the cache hierarchy, memory consistency models, cache coherence and write invalidation costs, NUMA regions, and coherence domains. New memory technologies promise fast non-volatile storage and expose unchartered trade-offs for transactional durability, such as exploiting byte-addressable hot and cold storage through persistent programming that promotes simpler recovery protocols. In the meantime, the plateauing single-threaded processor performance has brought massive concurrency within a single node, first in the form of multi-core, and now with many-core and heterogeneous processors. The exciting possibility to reshape the storage, transaction, logging, and recovery layers of next-generation systems on emerging hardware have prompted the database research community to vigorously debate the trade-offs between specialized kernels that narrowly focus on transaction processing performance vs. designs that permit transactionally consistent data accesses from decision support and analytical workloads. In this book, we aim to classify and distill the new body of work on transaction processing that has surfaced in the last decade to navigate researchers and practitioners through this intricate research subject.