Currently, POSTGRES is about 90,000 lines of code in C and is being used by assorted "bold and brave" early users. The system has been constructed by a team of 5 part time students led by a full time chief programmer over the last three years. During this period, we have made a large number of design and implementation choices. Moreover, in some areas we would do things quite differently if we were to start from scratch again. The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the design and implementation decisions we made and to offer advice to implementors who might follow some of our paths. In this paper we restrict our attention to the DBMS "backend" functions. In another paper some of us treat PICASSO, the application development environment that is being built on top of POSTGRES. 1. INTRODUCTION Current relational DBMSs are oriented toward efficient support for business data processing applications where large numbers of instances of fixed format records must be stored and accessed. Tr...

CLASSIC is a data model that encourages the description ofobjects not only in terms of their relations to other known objects, but in terms of a level of intensional structure as well. The CLASSIC language of structured descriptions permits i) partial descriptions of individuals, under an `open world' assumption, ii) answers to queries either as extensional lists of valuesorasdescriptions that necessarily hold of all possible answers, and iii) an easily extensible schema, which can be accessed uniformly with the data. One of the strengths of the approach is that the same language plays multiple roles in the processes of defining and populating the DB, as well as querying and answering. classic (for which we have a prototype main-memory implementation) can actively discover new information about objects from several sources: it can recognize new classes under which an object falls based on a description of the object, it can propagate some deductive consequences of DB upda...

One of the main tasks of mediators is to fuse information from heterogeneous information sources. This may involve, for example, removing redundancies, and resolving inconsistencies in favor of the most reliable source. The problem becomes harder when the sources are unstructured/semistructured and we do not have complete knowledge of their contents and structure. In this paper we show how many common fusion operations can be specified non-procedurally and succinctly. The key to our approach is to assign semantically meaningful object ids to objects as they are "imported " into the mediator.

We present a system for generating parsers based directly on the metaphor of parsing as deduction. Parsing algorithms can be represented directly as deduction systems, and a single deduction engine can interpret such deduction systems so as to implement the corresponding parser. The method generalizes easily to parsers for augmented phrase structure formalisms, such as definiteclause grammars and other logic grammar formalisms, and has been used for rapid prototyping of parsing algorithms for a variety of formalisms including variants of tree-adjoining grammars, categorial grammars, and lexicalized context-free grammars.

Several languages, such as LOREL and UnQL, support querying of semi-structured data. Others, such as WebSQL and WebLog, query Web sites. All these languages model data as labeled graphs and use regular path expressions to express queries that traverse arbitrary paths in graphs. Naive execution of path expressions is inefficient, however, because it often requires exhaustive graph search. We describe two optimization techniques for queries with regular path expressions, which we call regular queries. Both rely on graph schemas, which specify partial knowledge of a graph's structure. Query pruning restricts search to a fragment of the graph; we give an efficient algorithm for rewriting any regular query into a pruned one. Query rewriting using state extents can entirely eliminate or substantially reduce graph traversal; it is reminiscent of optimizing relational queries using indices. There may be several ways to optimize a query using state extents; we give an exponential-time algorith...

We consider a bottom-up query-evaluation scheme in which facts of relations are allowed to have nonground terms. The Magic Sets query-rewriting technique is generalized to allow arguments of predicates to be treated as bound even though the rules do not provide ground bindings for those arguments. In particular, we regard as "bound" any argument containing a function symbol or a variable that appears more than once in the argument list. Generalized "magic " predicates are thus defined to compute the set of all goals reached in a top-down exploration of the rules, starting from a given query goal; these goals are not facts of constants as in previous versions of the Magic Sets algorithm. The magic predicates are then used to restrict a bottom-up evaluation of the rules so that there are no redundant actions; that is, every step of the bottom-up computation must be performed by any algorithm that uses the same sideways information passing strategy (sips). The price paid, compared to prev...

Many problems encountered when building applications of database systems involve the manipulation of models. By “model, ” we mean a complex structure that represents a design artifact, such as a relational schema, object-oriented interface, UML model, XML DTD, web-site schema, semantic network, complex document, or software configuration. Many uses of models involve managing changes in models and transformations of data from one model into another. These uses require an explicit representation of “mappings ” between models. We propose to make database systems easier to use for these applications by making “model ” and “model mapping ” first-class objects with special operations that simplify their use. We call this capability model management. In addition to making the case for model management, our main contribution is a sketch of a proposed data model. The data model consists of formal, object-oriented structures for representing models and model mappings, and of high-level algebraic operations on those structures, such as matching, differencing, merging, function application, selection, inversion and instantiation. We focus on structure and semantics, not implementation. 1

This paper presents structural recursion as the basis of the syntax and semantics of query languages for semistructured data and XML. We describe a simple and powerful query language based on pattern matching and show that it can be expressed using structural recursion, which is introduced as a top-down, recursive function, similar to the way XSL is defined on XML trees. On cyclic data, structural recursion can be defined in two equivalent ways: as a recursive function which evaluates the data top-down and remembers all its calls to avoid infinite loops, or as a bulk evaluation which processes the entire data in parallel using only traditional relational algebra operators. The latter makes it possible for optimization techniques in relational queries to be applied to structural recursion. We show that the composition of two structural recursion queries can be expressed as a single such query, and this is used as the basis of an optimization method for mediator systems. Several other fo...

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The LDL system provides a declarative logic-based language and integrates relational database and logic programming technologies so as to support advanced data and knowledge-based applications. This paper contains a comprehensive overview of the system and contains a description of the LDL language and the compilation techniques employed to translate LDL queries into target queries on the stored data. The paper further contains a description of the architecture and runtime environment of the system and the optimization techniques employed in order to improve the performance and assure the safety of the compiled queries. The paper concludes with an account of the experience gained so far with the system, and discusses application areas where the LDL approach appears to be particularly effective.