Database management systems will continue to manage large data volumes. Thus, efficient algorithms for accessing and manipulating large sets and sequences will be required to provide acceptable performance. The advent of object-oriented and extensible database systems will not solve this problem. On the contrary, modern data models exacerbate it: In order to manipulate large sets of complex objects as efficiently as today’s database systems manipulate simple records, query processing algorithms and software will become more complex, and a solid understanding of algorithm and architectural issues is essential for the designer of database management software. This survey provides a foundation for the design and implementation of query execution facilities in new database management systems. It describes a wide array of practical query evaluation techniques for both relational and post-relational database systems, including iterative execution of complex query evaluation plans, the duality of sort- and hash-based set matching algorithms, types of parallel query execution and their implementation, and special operators for emerging database application domains.

Ontology mapping is seen as a solution provider in today's landscape of ontology research. As the number of ontologies that are made publicly available and accessible on the Web increases steadily, so does the need for applications to use them. A single ontology is no longer enough to support the tasks envisaged by a distributed environment like the Semantic Web. Multiple ontologies need to be accessed from several applications. Mapping could provide a common layer from which several ontologies could be accessed and hence could exchange information in semantically sound manners. Developing such mappings has been the focus of a variety of works originating from diverse communities over a number of years. In this article we comprehensively review and present these works. We also provide insights on the pragmatics of ontology mapping and elaborate on a theoretical approach for defining ontology mapping.

Lore (for Lightweight Object Repository) is a DBMS designed specifically for managing semistructured information. Implementing Lore has required rethinking all aspects of a DBMS, including storage management, indexing, query processing and optimization, and user interfaces. This paper provides an overview of these aspects of the Lore system, as well as other novel features such as dynamic structural summaries and seamless access to data from external sources.

Distributed data processing is fast becoming a reality. Businesses want to have it for many reasons, and they often must have it in order to stay competitive. While much of the infrastructure for distributed data processing is already in place (e.g., modern network technology), there are a number of issues which still make distributed data processing a complex undertaking: (1) distributed systems can become very large involving thousands of heterogeneous sites including PCs and mainframe server machines � (2) the state of a distributed system changes rapidly because the load of sites varies over time and new sites are added to the system� (3) legacy systems need to be integrated|such legacy systems usually have not been designed for distributed data processing and now need to interact with other (modern) systems in a distributed environment. This paper presents the state of the art of query processing for distributed database and information systems. The paper presents the \textbook " architecture for distributed query processing and a series of techniques that are particularly useful for distributed database systems. These techniques include special join techniques, techniques to exploit intra-query parallelism, techniques to reduce communication costs, and techniques to exploit caching and replication of data. Furthermore, the paper discusses di erent kinds of distributed systems such as client-server, middleware (multi-tier), and heterogeneous database systems and shows how query processing works in these systems. Categories and subject descriptors: E.5 [Data]:Files � H.2.4 [Database Management Systems]: distributed databases, query processing � H.2.5 [Heterogeneous Databases]: data translation General terms: algorithms � performance Additional key words and phrases: query optimization � query execution � client-server databases � middleware � multi-tier architectures � database application systems � wrappers� replication � caching � economic models for query processing � dissemination-based information systems 1

The standard approach to integrating heterogeneous information sources is to build a global schema that relates all of the information in the different sources, and to pose queries directly against it. The problem is that schema integration is usually difficult, and as soon as any of the information sources change or a new source is added, the process mayhave to be repeated. The SIMS system uses an alternative approach. A domain model of the application domain is created, establishing a fixed vocabulary for describing data sets in the domain. Using this language, each available information source is described. Queries to SIMS against the collection of available information sources are posed using terms from the domain model, and reformulation operators are employed to dynamically select an appropriate set of information sources and to determine how to integrate the available information to satisfy a query. This approach results in a system that is more flexible than existing ones, more easily scalable, and able to respond dynamically to newly available or unexpectedly missing information sources.

After more than 20 years of research and practice in software configuration management (SCM), constructing consistent configurations of versioned software products still remains a challenge. This article focuses on the version models underlying both commercial systems and research prototypes. It provides an overview and classification of different versioning paradigms and defines and relates fundamental concepts such as revisions, variants, configurations, and changes. In particular, we focus on intensional versioning, that is, construction of versions based on configuration rules. Finally, we provide an overview of systems that have had significant impact on the development of the SCM discipline and classify them according to a detailed taxonomy.

The Context Interchange strategy presents a novel perspective for mediated data access in which semantic conflicts among heterogeneous systems are not identified a priori, but are detected and reconciled by a context mediator through comparison of contexts axioms corresponding to the systems engaged in data exchange. In this article, we show that queries formulated on shared views, export schema, and shared “ontologies ” can be mediated in the same way using the Context Interchange framework. The proposed framework provides a logic-based object-oriented formalism for representing and reasoning about data semantics in disparate systems, and has been validated in a prototype implementation providing mediated data access to both traditional and web-based information sources. Categories and Subject Descriptors: H.2.4 [Database Management]: Systems—Query processing; H.2.5 [Database Management]: Heterogeneous Databases—Data translation

. Global information systems involve a large number of information sources distributed over computer networks. The variety of information sources and disparity of interfaces makes the task of easily locating and efficiently accessing information over the network very cumbersome. We describe an architecture for global information systems that is especially tailored to address the challenges raised in such an environment, and distinguish our architecture from architectures of multidatabase and distributed database systems. Our architecture is based on presenting a conceptually unified view of the information space to a user, specifying rich descriptions of the contents of the information sources, and using these descriptions for optimizing queries posed in the unified view. The contributions of this paper include: (1) we identify aspects of site descriptions that are useful in query optimization; (2) we describe query optimization techniques that minimize the number of information source...

As ontology development becomes a more ubiquitous and collaborative process, ontology versioning and evolution becomes an important area of ontology research. The many similarities between database-schema evolution and ontology evolution will allow us to build on the extensive research in schema evolution. However, there are also important differences between database schemas and ontologies. The differences stem from different usage paradigms, the presence of explicit semantics, and different knowledge models. A lot of problems that existed only in theory in database research come to the forefront as practical problems in ontology evolution. These differences have important implications for the development of ontology-evolution frameworks: The traditional distinction between versioning and evolution is not applicable to ontologies. There are several dimensions along which compatibility between versions must be considered. The set of change operations for ontologies is different. We must develop automatic techniques for finding similarities and differences between versions.

Query processing and optimization in mediator systems that access distributed non-proprietary sources pose many novel problems. Cost-based query optimization is hard because the mediator does not have access to source statistics information and furthermore it may not be easy to model the source's performance. At the same time, querying remote sources may be very expensive because of high connection overhead, long computation time, financial charges, and temporary unavailability. We propose a costbased optimization technique that caches statistics of actual calls to the sources and consequently estimates the cost of the possible execution plans based on the statistics cache. We investigate issues pertaining to the design of the statistics cache and experimentally analyze various tradeoffs. We also present a query result caching mechanism that allows us to effectively use results of prior queries when the source is not readily available. We employ the novel invariants mechanism, which s...