QMDS: a file system metadata management service supporting a graph data model-based query language

File system metadata management has become a bottleneck for many data-intensive applications that rely on high-performance file systems. Part of the bottleneck is due to the limitations of an almost 50-year-old interface standard with metadata abstractions that were designed at a time when high-end file systems managed less than 100 MB. Today's high-performance file systems store 7–9 orders of magnitude more data, resulting in a number of data items for which these metadata abstractions are inadequate, such as directory hierarchies unable to handle complex relationships among data. Users of file systems have attempted to work around these inadequacies by moving application-specific metadata management to relational databases to make metadata searchable. Splitting file system metadata management into two separate systems introduces inefficiencies and systems management problems. To address this problem, we propose QMDS: a file system metadata management service that integrates all file system metadata and uses a graph data model with attributes on nodes and edges. Our service uses a query language interface for file identification and attribute retrieval. We present our metadata management service design and architecture and study its performance using a text analysis benchmark application. Results from our QMDS prototype show the effectiveness of this approach. Compared to the use of a file system and relational database, the QMDS prototype shows superior performance for both ingest and query workloads.     

A graphical user interface server for unix

The UNIX operating system has attained widespread popularity because of its power, flexibility and elegance. However, the common user interfaces (shells) have been criticized as being cryptic and difficult to use, especially for novices. In this paper, we present a user interface server that can be used to provide a graphical shell for UNIX. This shell helps to overcome a number of difficulties faced by both novices and experts. Although it is largely intended to assist novices, it is also designed not to become a hindrance for expert users and does not sacrifice the basic power and flexibility of UNIX. The server is designed to augment rather than replace text-based interfaces and can be used from a variety of different interactive programs in addition to shells.     

A graphical query language: VISUAL and its query processing

This paper describes VISUAL, a graphical icon-based query language with a user-friendly graphical user interface for scientific databases and its query processing techniques. VISUAL is suitable for domains where visualization of the relationships is important for the domain scientist to express queries. In VISUAL, graphical objects are not tied to the underlying formalism; instead, they represent the relationships of the application domain. VISUAL supports relational, nested, and object-oriented models naturally and has formal basis. For ease of understanding and for efficiency reasons, two VISUAL semantics are introduced, namely, the interpretation and execution semantics. Translations from VISUAL to the Object Query Language (for portability considerations) and to an object algebra (for query processing purposes) are presented. Concepts of external and internal queries are developed as modularization tools.     

基于Aurora系统的持续型查询语言设计与实现

随着新型数据应用的不断出现,针对流形态数据的数据流管理系统已经成为数据管理领域研究的新热点。针对目前通用数据流管理系统只支持基于操作符流图的查询表达方式这一不足,设计了一种新的持续型数据流查询语言,并在通用数据流处理系统Aurora上进行了实现。为验证新语言的表达能力,该系统使用新语言定义了数据流基准测试Linear Road Benchmark的查询集,在Aurora系统上部署运行。测试结果表明针对Linear Road Benchmark的测试用例,新语言具有较完备的语义和良好的表达能力。     

Fibonacci: A programming language for object databases

Fibonacci is an object-oriented database programming language characterized by static and strong typing, and by new mechanisms for modeling data-bases in terms of objects with roles, classes, and associations. A brief introduction to the language is provided to present those features, which are particularly suited to modeling complex databases. Examples of the use of Fibonacci are given with reference to the prototype implementation of the language.     

XQBE: A Graphical Environment to Query XML Data

XQuery, the standard query language for XML, is increasingly popular among computer scientists with SQL background, since XQuery and SQL require comparable skills. However, these experts are limited in number, and the availability of easier XQuery “dialects” could be extremely valuable. With this motivation in mind, we designed XQBE, a visual dialect of XQuery inspired by the QBE language (Query by Example). Coherent with the hierarchical nature of XML, XQBE uses one or more hierarchical structures to denote the input documents and one structure to denote the document produced in output. These structures are annotated to express selection predicates; explicit binding edges connecting the nodes of these structures visualize the input/output mappings. This paper presents XQBE through several examples and describes the main features of our implementation of the language, a visual editor coupled with an XQBE-to-XQuery translator. Indeed, the XQBE front-end is a general purpose user-friendly visual query interface, capable of providing access to any data storage system that exposes XQuery APIs. Available schema information can be exploited to guide users in querying data sets they are not familiar with. Also, switching between the visual and textual versions of the same query could be helpful for XQuery learners.     

Evaluating the usability of natural language query languages and interfaces to Semantic Web knowledge bases

The need to make the contents of the Semantic Web accessible to end-users becomes increasingly pressing as the amount of information stored in ontology-based knowledge bases steadily increases. Natural language interfaces (NLIs) provide a familiar and convenient means of query access to Semantic Web data for casual end-users. While several studies have shown that NLIs can achieve high retrieval performance as well as domain independence, this paper focuses on usability and investigates if NLIs and natural language query languages are useful from an end-user's point of view. To that end, we introduce four interfaces each allowing a different query language and present a usability study benchmarking these interfaces. The results of the study reveal a clear preference for full natural language query sentences with a limited set of sentence beginnings over keywords or formal query languages. NLIs to ontology-based knowledge bases can, therefore, be considered to be useful for casual or occasional end-users. As such, the overarching contribution is one step towards the theoretical vision of the Semantic Web becoming reality.     

A coherent query language for XML

Text search engines are inadequate for indexing and searching XML documents because they ignore metadata and aggregation structure implicit in the XML documents. On the other hand, the query languages supported by specialized XML search engines are very complex. In this paper, we present a simple yet flexible query language, and develop its semantics to enable intuitively appealing extraction of relevant fragments of information while simultaneously falling back on retrieval through plain text search if necessary. Our approach combines and generalizes several available techniques to obtain precise and coherent results.

Object-oriented query language access to relational databases: A semantic framework for query translation

This research investigates and approach to query processing in a multidatabase system that uses an objectoriented model to capture the semantics of other data models. The object-oriented model is used to construct a global schema, defining an integrated view of the different schemas in the environment. The model is also used as a self-describing model to build a meta-database for storing information about the global schema. A unique aspect of this work is that the object-oriented model is used to describe the different data models of the multidatabase environment, thereby extending the meta database with semantic information about the local schemas. With the global and local schemas all represented in an object-oriented form, structural mappings between the global schema and each local schema are then easily supported. An object algebra then provides a query language for expressing global queries, using the structural mappings to translate object algebra queries into SQL queries over local relational schema. The advantage of using an object algebra is that the object-oriented database can be viewed as a blackboard for temporary storage of local data and for establishing relationships between different databases. The object algebra can be used to directly retrieve temporarily-stored data from the object-oriented database or to transparently retrieve data from local sources using the translation process described in this paper.     

Complexity measurement of a graphical programming language

For many years the software engineering community has been attacking the software reliability problem on two fronts. First via design methodologies, languages and tools as a pre-check on complexity and secondly by measuring the complexity of produced software as a post-check. This research attempts to unify the approach to creating reliable software by providing the ability to measure the complexity of a design prior to its implementation. We have successfully defined and applied software metrics to graphical designs in an effort to predict software complexity early in the software life cycle. Metric values from the graphical design are input to predictor equations, provided in this paper, to give metric values for the resultant source code.     

A semiotic analysis of unified modeling language graphical notations

Unified modeling language (UML) is the standard modeling language for object-oriented system development. Despite its status as a standard, UML has a fuzzy formal specification and a weak theoretical foundation. Semiotics, the study of signs, provides a good theoretical foundation for UML research because graphical notations (or visual signs) of UML are subjected to the principles of signs. In our research, we use semiotics to study the effectiveness of graphical notations in UML. We hypothesized that the use of iconic signs as UML graphical notations leads to representation that is more accurately interpreted and that arouses fewer connotations than the use of symbolic signs. An open-ended survey was used to test these hypotheses. The results support our propositions that iconic UML graphical notations are more accurately interpreted by subjects and that the number of connotations is lower for iconic UML graphical notations than for symbolic UML graphical notations. The results have both theoretical and practical significance. This study illustrates the usefulness of using semiotics as a theoretical underpinning in analyzing, evaluating, and comparing graphical notations for modeling constructs. The results of this research also suggest ways and means of enhancing the graphical notations of UML modeling constructs.     

Thémis: A database programming language handling integrity constraints

This article presents a database programming language, Thémis, which supports subtyping and class hierarchies, and allows for the definition of integrity constraints in a global and declarative way. We first describe the salient features of the language: types, names, classes, integrity constraints (including methods), and transactions. The inclusion of methods into integrity constraints allows an increase of the declarative power of these constraints. Indeed, the information needed to define a constraint is not always stored in the database through attributes, but is sometimes computed or derived data. Then, we address the problem of efficiently checking constraints. More specifically, we consider two different problems: (1) statically reducing the number of constraints to be checked, and (2) generating an efficient run-time checker. Using simple strategies, one can significantly improve the efficiency of the verification. We show how to reduce the number of constraints to be checked by characterizing the portions of the database that are involved in both the constraints and in a transaction. We also show how to generate efficient algorithms for checking a large class of constraints. We show how all the techniques presented exploit the underlying type system, which provides significant help in solving (1) and (2). Last, the current status of the Thémis prototype is presented.     

A graphical user-interface for knowledge discovery in databases

This paper describes a graphical user-interface for database-oriented knowledge discovery systems, DBLEARN, which has been developed for extracting knowledge rules from relational databases. The interface, designed using a query-by-example approach, provides a graphical means of specifying knowledge-discovery tasks. The interface supplies a graphical browsing facility to help users to perceive the nature of the target database structure. In order to guide users' task specification, a cooperative, menu-based guidance facility has been integrated into the interface. The interface also supplies a graphical interactive adjusting facility for helping users to refine the task specification to improve the quality of learned knowledge rules.     

XML形式数据模型及其查询代数

提出了XML的形式数据模型及其查询代数,主要包括以下几个方面：构造先后序关系、引入带根连通有向图、建立XML形式数据模型(XFDM)和XML查询代数(XFQA)。它形成了一个较为完整的XML数据库管理系统的理论基础,可以作为XML以及其它半结构化数据库管理系统查询存储、查询分解、查询优化和查询实现的形式化基础。     

Formal language identification: query learning vs. Gold-style learning

A natural approach towards powerful machine learning systems is to enable options for additional machine/user interactions, for instance by allowing the system to ask queries about the concept to be learned. This motivates the development and analysis of adequate formal learning models.In the present paper, we investigate two different types of query learning models in the context of learning indexable classes of recursive languages: Angluin's original model and a relaxation thereof, called learning with extra queries. In the original model the learner is restricted to query languages belonging to the target class, while in the new model it is allowed to query other languages, too. As usual, the following standard types of queries are considered: superset, subset, equivalence, and membership queries.The learning capabilities of the resulting query learning models are compared to one another and to different versions of Gold-style language learning from only positive data and from positive and negative data (including finite learning, conservative inference, and learning in the limit). A complete picture of the relation of all these models has been elaborated. A couple of interesting differences and similarities between query learning and Gold-style learning have been observed. In particular, query learning with extra superset queries coincides with conservative inference from only positive data. This result documents the naturalness of the new query model.     

Generalized Query-By-Rule: a heterogeneous database query language

This paper describes the design and implementation of a high-level query language called Generalized Query-By-Rule (GQBR) which supports retrieval, insertion, deletion and update operations. This language, based on the formalism of database logic, enables the users to access each database in a distributed heterogeneous environment, without having to learn all the different data manipulation languages. The compiler has been implemented on a DEC 1090 system in Pascal.     

MIS系统查询功能的设计与实现

查询功能是管理信息系统的重要组成部分，是评判管理信息系统性能的重要因素。系统中数据的复杂多样，决定了针对这些数据的查询也应该是多样的。文章根据查询内容分析了查询的种类，并给出了在某管理信息系统中的实现方法。