ACM Digital Review

Reviews

Trustworthy Keyword Search for Regulatory-Compliant Record RetentionSuperb rating by jag.
Authors:Soumyadeb Mitra, Windsor W. Hsu, Marianne Winslett[Review Same]
Review:
This charming paper shows how to create a usable inverted index in a world where no deletions (or modifications) are allowed, to the indexed data and to the index. The application is that of records retention -- the authors argue convincingly that merely retaining information, such as an email, does not mean that it can be found easily later: what is additionally required is that an indexed search path to it also be guaranteed to exist.

The problem studied in this paper is certainly not in the core of a database engine, but it is an elegant study of a compelling problem.


Adaptive Execution of Variable-Accuracy FunctionsPositive rating by jag.
Authors:Matthew Denny and Michael Franklin[Review Same]
Review:
Accuracy of result is often traded for computation time in real-time systems, and in applications such as video streaming. In the database context, we have seen a similar trade off when using samples to estimate aggregate values over large data warehouses. This paper studies the application of this trade off to user-defined functions (UDFs). While this idea is simple, UDFs are not easily integrated into a query optimizer, or any other part of the query processing pipe, for that matter, so that the implementation of the idea requires some clever engineering. While the specifics of the engineering required for a different system may differ in the details, I think the major lessons do carry over. That the authors were able to pull it off at all is worth our respect.

ULDBs: Databases with Uncertainty and LineagePositive rating by jag.
Authors:Omar Benjelloun, Anish Das Sarma, Alon Halevy, Jennifer Widom [Review Same]
Review:
There has been considerable activity around uncertainty in databases recently, and also on the maintenance of lineage (or provenance) for data. The set of applications in which we are likely to care about the former has a vary large overlap with the set of applications in which we care about the latter. So thinking about the two concepts jointly makes a great deal of sense, and this paper develops some elegant results in this direction.

I would contend, though, that the types of applications that beg for uncertainty and provenance management are also likely to involve data that is not very well structured. As such, I would expect work in this direction to have much greater practical value if done in the context of XML, rather than in the context of the relational data model as in this paper, and in much of the body of literature on similar topics. The simplicity of the relational data model does make it easier to establish theoretical results, and one does have to start somewhere. Kudos to this paper for taking an important first step.


Efficiently Linking Text Documents with Relevant Structured InformationPositive rating by jag.
Authors:Venkatesan T. Chakaravarthy, Himanshu Gupta, Prasan Roy, Mukesh Mohania[Review Same]
Review:
There has recently been a flurry of activity surrounding keyword search in structured databases, beginning with the BANKS project, and leading up to my own work on Schema-Free XQuery. The idea in this line of work has been to find a small "local" part of the database that can match all the specified query terms.

This paper addresses the complement of this problem. Given a document, and a set of structured entities in a database, how does one match up entities against sets of co-located words in the document. The issues and challenges are similar to those in the stream of work mentioned above, but the problem setting is new and interesting.


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