Rui Zhang

The University of Arizona | UA · Department of Computer Science

It is surprisingly hard to obtain accurate and precise measurements of the time spent executing a query because there are many sources of variance. To understand these sources, we review relevant per-process and overall measures obtainable from the Linux kernel and introduce a structural causal model relating these measures. A thorough correlationa...

Software engineering frameworks tame the complexity of large collections of classes by identifying structural invariants, regularizing interfaces, and increasing sharing across the collection. We wish to appropriate these benefits for families of closely related benchmarks, say for evaluating query engine implementation strategies. We introduce the...

In the database field, while very strong mathematical and engineering work has been done, the scientific approach has been much less prominent. The deep understanding of query optimizers obtained through the scientific approach can lead to better engineered designs. Unlike other domains, there have been few DBMS-dedicated laboratories, focusing on...

It is surprisingly hard to obtain accurate and precise measurements of the time spent executing a query. We review relevant process and overall measures obtainable from the Linux kernel and introduce a structural causal model relating these measures. A thorough correlational analysis provides strong support for this model. Using this model, we deve...

If past versions of XML documents are retained, what of the various integrity constraints defined in XML Schema on those documents? This paper describes how to interpret such constraints as sequenced constraints, applicable at each point in time. We also consider how to add new variants that apply across time, so-called non-sequenced constraints. O...

Database management systems (DBMSes) form a cornerstone of modern IT infrastructure, and it is essential that they have excellent performance. Much of the work to date on optimizing DBMS performance has emphasized ensuring efficient data access from secondary storage. This paper shows that DBMSes can also benefit significantly from dynamic code spe...

We show how to extend temporal support of SQL to the Turing-complete portion of SQL, that of persistent stored modules (PSM). Our approach requires minor new syntax beyond that already in SQL/Temporal to define and to invoke PSM procedures and functions, thereby extending the current, sequenced, and non-sequenced semantics of queries to such routin...

Relational database management systems are general in the sense that they can handle arbitrary schemas, queries, and modifications, this generality is implemented using runtime metadata lookups and tests that ensure that control is channelled to the appropriate code in all cases. Unfortunately, these lookups and tests are carried out even when info...

Relational database management systems support a wide variety of data types and operations. Such generality involves much branch condition checking, which introduces inefficiency within the query evaluation loop. We previously introduced micro-specialization, which improves performance by eliminating unnecessary branching statements and the actual...

Constructing time decompositions of time stamped documents is an important step for uncovering temporal relationships and trends of keywords and topics contained in the document set. This paper describes the use of time decompositions to extract temporal information from a small set of PubMed abstracts related to the Wnt signaling pathway. A time d...

Identifying temporal information of topics from a document set typically involves constructing a time decomposition of the time period associated with the document set. In an earlier work, we formulated several metrics on a time decomposition, such as size, information loss, and variability, and gave dynamic programming based algorithms to construc...