Computer Science

A log structured store uses a single write I/O for a number of diverse and non-contiguous pages within a large buffer instead of using a write I/O for each page separately. This requires that pages be relocated on every write, because pages are never updated in place. Instead, pages are dynamically remapped on every write. Log structuring was invented for and used initially in file systems. Today, a form of log structuring is used in SSD controllers because an SSD requires the erasure of a large block of pages before flash storage can be reused. No update-in-place requires that the storage for out-of-date pages be reclaimed (garbage collected or "cleaned"). We analyze cleaning performance and introduce a cleaning strategy that uses a new way to prioritize the order in which stale pages are garbage collected. Our cleaning strategy approximates an "optimal cleaning strategy". Simulation studies confirm the results of the analysis. This strategy is a significant improvement over previous cleaning strategies.

Users who care about their data store it in databases, which (at least in principle) guarantee some form of transactional isolation. However, experience shows [Kleppmann 2019, Kingsbury and Patella 2019a] that many databases do not provide the isolation guarantees they claim. With the recent proliferation of new distributed databases, demand has grown for checkers that can, by generating client workloads and injecting faults, produce anomalies that witness a violation of a stated guarantee. An ideal checker would be sound (no false positives), efficient (polynomial in history length and concurrency), effective (finding violations in real databases), general (analyzing many patterns of transactions), and informative (justifying the presence of an anomaly with understandable counterexamples). Sadly, we are aware of no checkers that satisfy these goals. We present Elle: a novel checker which infers an Adya-style dependency graph between client-observed transactions. It does so by carefully selecting database objects and operations when generating histories, so as to ensure that the results of database reads reveal information about their version history. Elle can detect every anomaly in Adya et al's formalism [Adya et al. 2000] (except for predicates), discriminate between them, and provide concise explanations of each. This paper makes the following contributions: we present Elle, demonstrate its soundness, measure its efficiency against the current state of the art, and give evidence of its effectiveness via a case study of four real databases.

Investigative Journalism (IJ, in short) is staple of modern, democratic societies. IJ often necessitates working with large, dynamic sets of heterogeneous, schema-less data sources, which can be structured, semi-structured, or textual, limiting the applicability of classical data integration approaches. In prior work, we have developed ConnectionLens, a system capable of integrating such sources into a single heterogeneous graph, leveraging Information Extraction (IE) techniques; users can then query the graph by means of keywords, and explore query results and their neighborhood using an interactive GUI. Our keyword search problem is complicated by the graph heterogeneity, and by the lack of a result score function that would allow to prune some of the search space. In this work, we describe an actual IJ application studying conflicts of interest in the biomedical domain, and we show how ConnectionLens supports it. Then, we present novel techniques addressing the scalability challenges raised by this application: one allows to reduce the significant IE costs while building the graph, while the other is a novel, parallel, in-memory keyword search engine, which achieves orders of magnitude speed-up over our previous engine. Our experimental study on the real-world IJ application data confirms the benefits of our contributions.

Ontology-Based Data Access (OBDA) has traditionally focused on providing a unified view of heterogeneous datasets, either by materializing integrated data into RDF or by performing on-the fly querying via SPARQL query translation. In the specific case of tabular datasets represented as several CSV or Excel files, query translation approaches have been applied by considering each source as a single table that can be loaded into a relational database management system (RDBMS). Nevertheless, constraints over these tables are not represented; thus, neither consistency among attributes nor indexes over tables are enforced. As a consequence, efficiency of the SPARQL-to-SQL translation process may be affected, as well as the completeness of the answers produced during the evaluation of the generated SQL query. Our work is focused on applying implicit constraints on the OBDA query translation process over tabular data. We propose Morph-CSV, a framework for querying tabular data that exploits information from typical OBDA inputs (e.g., mappings, queries) to enforce constraints that can be used together with any SPARQL-to-SQL OBDA engine. Morph-CSV relies on both a constraint component and a set of constraint operators. For a given set of constraints, the operators are applied to each type of constraint with the aim of enhancing query completeness and performance. We evaluate Morph-CSV in several domains: e-commerce with the BSBM benchmark; transportation with a benchmark using the GTFS dataset from the Madrid subway; and biology with a use case extracted from the Bio2RDF project. We compare and report the performance of two SPARQL-to-SQL OBDA engines, without and with the incorporation of MorphCSV. The observed results suggest that Morph-CSV is able to speed up the total query execution time by up to two orders of magnitude, while it is able to produce all the query answers.

We investigate the enumeration of query results for an important subset of CQs with projections, namely star and path queries. The task is to design data structures and algorithms that allow for efficient enumeration with delay guarantees after a preprocessing phase. Our main contribution is a series of results based on the idea of interleaving precomputed output with further join processing to maintain delay guarantees, which maybe of independent interest. In particular, for star queries, we design combinatorial algorithms that provide instance-specific delay guarantees in linear preprocessing time. These algorithms improve upon the currently best known results. Further, we show how existing results can be improved upon by using fast matrix multiplication. We also present new results involving tradeoff between preprocessing time and delay guarantees for enumeration of path queries that contain projections. CQs with projection where the join attribute is projected away is equivalent to boolean matrix multiplication. Our results can therefore also be interpreted as sparse, output-sensitive matrix multiplication with delay guarantees.

The algebraic approach for provenance tracking, originating in the semiring model of Green et. al, has proven useful as an abstract way of handling metadata. Commutative Semirings were shown to be the "correct" algebraic structure for Union of Conjunctive Queries, in the sense that its use allows provenance to be invariant under certain expected query equivalence axioms. In this paper we present the first (to our knowledge) algebraic provenance model, for a fragment of update queries, that is invariant under set equivalence. The fragment that we focus on is that of hyperplane queries, previously studied in multiple lines of work. Our algebraic provenance structure and corresponding provenance-aware semantics are based on the sound and complete axiomatization of Karabeg and Vianu. We demonstrate that our construction can guide the design of concrete provenance model instances for different applications. We further study the efficient generation and storage of provenance for hyperplane update queries. We show that a naive algorithm can lead to an exponentially large provenance expression, but remedy this by presenting a normal form which we show may be efficiently computed alongside query evaluation. We experimentally study the performance of our solution and demonstrate its scalability and usefulness, and in particular the effectiveness of our normal form representation.

A view with a binding pattern is a parameterized query on a database. Such views are used, e.g., to model Web services. To answer a query on such views, the views have to be orchestrated together in execution plans. We show how queries can be rewritten into equivalent execution plans, which are guaranteed to deliver the same results as the query on all databases. We provide a correct and complete algorithm to find these plans for path views and atomic queries. Finally, we show that our method can be used to answer queries on real-world Web services.

Embedding networks into a fixed dimensional feature space, while preserving its essential structural properties is a fundamental task in graph analytics. These feature vectors (graph descriptors) are used to measure the pairwise similarity between graphs. This enables applying data mining algorithms (e.g classification, clustering, or anomaly detection) on graph-structured data which have numerous applications in multiple domains. State-of-the-art algorithms for computing descriptors require the entire graph to be in memory, entailing a huge memory footprint, and thus do not scale well to increasing sizes of real-world networks. In this work, we propose streaming algorithms to efficiently approximate descriptors by estimating counts of sub-graphs of order k≤4 , and thereby devise extensions of two existing graph comparison paradigms: the Graphlet Kernel and NetSimile. Our algorithms require a single scan over the edge stream, have space complexity that is a fraction of the input size, and approximate embeddings via a simple sampling scheme. Our design exploits the trade-off between available memory and estimation accuracy to provide a method that works well for limited memory requirements. We perform extensive experiments on real-world networks and demonstrate that our algorithms scale well to massive graphs.

In this paper, we study the problem of evaluating persistent queries over streaming graphs in a principled fashion. These queries need to be evaluated over unbounded and very high speed graph streams. We define a streaming graph model and a streaming graph query model incorporating navigational queries, subgraph queries and paths as first-class citizens. To support this full-fledged query model we develop a streaming graph algebra that describes the precise semantics of persistent graph queries with their complex constructs. We present transformation rules and describe query formulation and plan generation for persistent graph queries over streaming graphs. Our implementation of a streaming graph query processor based on the dataflow computational model shows the feasibility of our approach and allows us to gauge the high performance gains obtained for query processing over streaming graphs.

Recent advances in Computer Vision and Deep Learning made possible the efficient extraction of a schema from frames of streaming video. As such, a stream of objects and their associated classes along with unique object identifiers derived via object tracking can be generated, providing unique objects as they are captured across frames. In this paper we initiate a study of temporal queries involving objects and their co-occurrences in video feeds. For example, queries that identify video segments during which the same two red cars and the same two humans appear jointly for five minutes are of interest to many applications ranging from law enforcement to security and safety. We take the first step and define such queries in a way that they incorporate certain physical aspects of video capture such as object occlusion. We present an architecture consisting of three layers, namely object detection/tracking, intermediate data generation and query evaluation. We propose two techniques,MFS and SSG, to organize all detected objects in the intermediate data generation layer, which effectively, given the queries, minimizes the number of objects and frames that have to be considered during query evaluation. We also introduce an algorithm called State Traversal (ST) that processes incoming frames against the SSG and efficiently prunes objects and frames unrelated to query evaluation, while maintaining all states required for succinct query evaluation. We present the results of a thorough experimental evaluation utilizing both real and synthetic data establishing the trade-offs between MFS and SSG. We stress various parameters of interest in our evaluation and demonstrate that the proposed query evaluation methodology coupled with the proposed algorithms is capable to evaluate temporal queries over video feeds efficiently, achieving orders of magnitude performance benefits.