Ihab F. Ilyas

A survey of top- k query processing techniques in relational database systems

Efficient processing of top-k queries is a crucial requirement in many interactive environments that involve massive amounts of data. In particular, efficient top-k processing in domains such as the Web, multimedia search, and distributed systems has shown a great impact on performance. In this survey, we describe and classify top-k processing techniques in relational databases. We discuss different design dimensions in the current techniques including query models, data access methods, implementation levels, data and query certainty, and supported scoring functions. We show the implications of each dimension on the design of the underlying techniques. We also discuss top-k queries in XML domain, and show their connections to relational approaches.

Supporting top- k join queries in relational databases

Abstract.Ranking queries, also known as top-k queries, produce results that are ordered on some computed score. Typically, these queries involve joins, where users are usually interested only in the top-k join results. Top-k queries are dominant in many emerging applications, e.g., multimedia retrieval by content, Web databases, data mining, middlewares, and most information retrieval applications. Current relational query processors do not handle ranking queries efficiently, especially when joins are involved. In this paper, we address supporting top-k join queries in relational query processors. We introduce a new rank-join algorithm that makes use of the individual orders of its inputs to produce join results ordered on a user-specified scoring function. The idea is to rank the join results progressively during the join operation. We introduce two physical query operators based on variants of ripple join that implement the rank-join algorithm. The operators are nonblocking and can be integrated into pipelined execution plans. We also propose an efficient heuristic designed to optimize a top-k join query by choosing the best join order. We address several practical issues and optimization heuristics to integrate the new join operators in practical query processors. We implement the new operators inside a prototype database engine based on PREDATOR. The experimental evaluation of our approach compares recent algorithms for joining ranked inputs and shows superior performance.

Efficient search for the top-k probable nearest neighbors in uncertain databases

Uncertainty pervades many domains in our lives. Current real-life applications, e.g., location tracking using GPS devices or cell phones, multimedia feature extraction, and sensor data management, deal with different kinds of uncertainty. Finding the nearest neighbor objects to a given query point is an important query type in these applications. In this paper, we study the problem of finding objects with the highest marginal probability of being the nearest neighbors to a query object. We adopt a general uncertainty model allowing for data and query uncertainty. Under this model, we define new query semantics, and provide several efficient evaluation algorithms. We analyze the cost factors involved in query evaluation, and present novel techniques to address the trade-offs among these factors. We give multiple extensions to our techniques including handling dependencies among data objects, and answering threshold queries. We conduct an extensive experimental study to evaluate our techniques on both real and synthetic data.

Rank-aware query optimization

Ranking is an important property that needs to be fully supported by current relational query engines. Recently, several rank-join query operators have been proposed based on rank aggregation algorithms. Rank-join operators progressively rank the join results while performing the join operation. The new operators have a direct impact on traditional query processing and optimization.We introduce a rank-aware query optimization framework that fully integrates rank-join operators into relational query engines. The framework is based on extending the System R dynamic programming algorithm in both enumeration and pruning. We define ranking as an interesting property that triggers the generation of rank-aware query plans. Unlike traditional join operators, optimizing for rank-join operators depends on estimating the input cardinality of these operators. We introduce a probabilistic model for estimating the input cardinality, and hence the cost of a rank-join operator. To our knowledge, this paper is the first effort in estimating the needed input size for optimal rank aggregation algorithms. Costing ranking plans, although challenging, is key to the full integration of rank-join operators in real-world query processing engines. We experimentally evaluate our framework by modifying the query optimizer of an open-source database management system. The experiments show the validity of our framework and the accuracy of the proposed estimation model.

NADEEF: a commodity data cleaning system

Despite the increasing importance of data quality and the rich theoretical and practical contributions in all aspects of data cleaning, there is no single end-to-end off-the-shelf solution to (semi-)automate the detection and the repairing of violations w.r.t. a set of heterogeneous and ad-hoc quality constraints. In short, there is no commodity platform similar to general purpose DBMSs that can be easily customized and deployed to solve application-specific data quality problems. In this paper, we present NADEEF, an extensible, generalized and easy-to-deploy data cleaning platform. NADEEF distinguishes between a programming interface and a core to achieve generality and extensibility. The programming interface allows the users to specify multiple types of data quality rules, which uniformly define what is wrong with the data and (possibly) how to repair it through writing code that implements predefined classes. We show that the programming interface can be used to express many types of data quality rules beyond the well known CFDs (FDs), MDs and ETL rules. Treating user implemented interfaces as black-boxes, the core provides algorithms to detect errors and to clean data. The core is designed in a way to allow cleaning algorithms to cope with multiple rules holistically, i.e. detecting and repairing data errors without differentiating between various types of rules. We showcase two implementations for core repairing algorithms. These two implementations demonstrate the extensibility of our core, which can also be replaced by other user-provided algorithms. Using real-life data, we experimentally verify the generality, extensibility, and effectiveness of our system.

Guided data repair

In this paper we present GDR, a Guided Data Repair framework that incorporates user feedback in the cleaning process to enhance and accelerate existing automatic repair techniques while minimizing user involvement. GDR consults the user on the updates that are most likely to be beneficial in improving data quality. GDR also uses machine learning methods to identify and apply the correct updates directly to the database without the actual involvement of the user on these specific updates. To rank potential updates for consultation by the user, we first group these repairs and quantify the utility of each group using the decision-theory concept of value of information (VOI). We then apply active learning to order updates within a group based on their ability to improve the learned model. User feedback is used to repair the database and to adaptively refine the training set for the model. We empirically evaluate GDR on a real-world dataset and show significant improvement in data quality using our user guided repairing process. We also, assess the trade-off between the user efforts and the resulting data quality.

Holistic data cleaning: Putting violations into context

Data cleaning is an important problem and data quality rules are the most promising way to face it with a declarative approach. Previous work has focused on specific formalisms, such as functional dependencies (FDs), conditional functional dependencies (CFDs), and matching dependencies (MDs), and those have always been studied in isolation. Moreover, such techniques are usually applied in a pipeline or interleaved. In this work we tackle the problem in a novel, unified framework. First, we let users specify quality rules using denial constraints with ad-hoc predicates. This language subsumes existing formalisms and can express rules involving numerical values, with predicates such as “greater than” and “less than”. More importantly, we exploit the interaction of the heterogeneous constraints by encoding them in a conflict hypergraph. Such holistic view of the conflicts is the starting point for a novel definition of repair context which allows us to compute automatically repairs of better quality w.r.t. previous approaches in the literature. Experimental results on real datasets show that the holistic approach outperforms previous algorithms in terms of quality and efficiency of the repair.

Joining ranked inputs in practice

Joining ranked inputs is an essential requirement for many database applications, such as ranking search results from multiple search engines and answering multi-feature queries for multimedia retrieval systems. We introduce a new practical pipelined query operator, termed NRA-RJ, that produces a global rank from input ranked streams based on a score function. The output of NRA-RJ can serve as a valid input to other NRA-RJ operators in the query pipeline. Hence, the NRA-RJ operator can support a hierarchy of join operations and can be easily integrated in query processing engines of commercial database systems. The NRA-RJ operator bridges Fagins optimal aggregation algorithm into a practical implementation and contains several optimizations that address performance issues. We compare the performance of NRA-RJ against recent rank join algorithms. Experimental results demonstrate the performance trade-offs among these algorithms. The experimental results are based on an empirical study applied to a medical video application on top of a prototype database system. The study reveals important design options and shows that the NRA-RJ operator outperforms other pipelined rank join operators when the join condition is an equi-join on key attributes.

KATARA: A Data Cleaning System Powered by Knowledge Bases and Crowdsourcing

Classical approaches to clean data have relied on using integrity constraints, statistics, or machine learning. These approaches are known to be limited in the cleaning accuracy, which can usually be improved by consulting master data and involving experts to resolve ambiguity. The advent of knowledge bases KBs both general-purpose and within enterprises, and crowdsourcing marketplaces are providing yet more opportunities to achieve higher accuracy at a larger scale. We propose KATARA, a knowledge base and crowd powered data cleaning system that, given a table, a KB, and a crowd, interprets table semantics to align it with the KB, identifies correct and incorrect data, and generates top-k possible repairs for incorrect data. Experiments show that KATARA can be applied to various datasets and KBs, and can efficiently annotate data and suggest possible repairs.

Supporting ad-hoc ranking aggregates

This paper presents a principled framework for efficient processing of ad-hoc top-k (ranking) aggregate queries, which provide the k groups with the highest aggregates as results. Essential support of such queries is lacking in current systems, which process the queries in a naïve materialize-group-sort scheme that can be prohibitively inefficient. Our framework is based on three fundamental principles. The Upper-Bound Principle dictates the requirements of early pruning, and the Group-Ranking and Tuple-Ranking Principles dictate group-ordering and tuple-ordering requirements. They together guide the query processor toward a provably optimal tuple schedule for aggregate query processing. We propose a new execution framework to apply the principles and requirements. We address the challenges in realizing the framework and implementing new query operators, enabling efficient group-aware and rank-aware query plans. The experimental study validates our framework by demonstrating orders of magnitude performance improvement in the new query plans, compared with the traditional plans.