Advisor: Raghu Ramakrishnan

Areas of Interest: Database Systems, Data Analysis, OLAP, Visualization, High Dimensional Data, Performance, Data Mining, ...

Thesis: Interactive Data Analysis using Query Set Templates

I am investigating techniques to support families of related queries that arise during data analysis. My ideas were inspired by (and will be implemented in) the DEVise project. In DEVise, many views of data are simultaneously presented to the analyst. The data needs for each view is represented by one query template (i.e., a parameterized query), and the entire collection of queries is called a query set template, or Qset for short. Once the data needs are described by a Qset, several opportunities arise. In particular, I am interested in multiple query optimization and processing, automatic index selection, and automatic materialized view selection.

My other main interest is in extending relational database systems with support for sequence data. A relation is an unordered collection of records. Often, however, there is an underlying order (e.g., a sequence of stock prices), and users want to pose queries that reflect this order (e.g., find a weekly moving average). SQL provides little support for posing such queries. My colleagues and I have proposed an extension to SQL, called SRQL, that can express a rich class of queries over sorted relations. We believe SRQL can be easily and efficiently supported in current RDBMSs with only minor extensions.

Publications

• How To Roll a Join: Asynchronous Incremental View Maintenance Kenneth Salem, Kevin S. Beyer, Bruce Lindsay, Roberta Cochrane. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, May 2000. (pdf)

• Bottom-Up Computation of Sparse and Iceberg CUBEs. Kevin S. Beyer and Raghu Ramakrishnan. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, pages 359-370, June 1999. (ps.gz)

• When Is "Nearest Neighbor" Meaningful? Kevin S. Beyer, Jonathan Goldstein, Raghu Ramakrishnan, Uri Shaft. In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Database Theory (ICDT), January 1999. (ps.gz)

• SRQL: Sorted Relational Query Language. Raghu Ramakrishnan, Donko Donjerkovic, Arvind Ranganathan, Kevin S. Beyer, Muralidhar Krishnaprasad. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Scientific and Statistical Database Management (SSDBM), July 1998. (ps.gz) (pdf)

• DEVise: Integrated Querying and Visual Exploration of Large Datasets. Miron Livny, Raghu Ramakrishnan, Kevin S. Beyer, Guangshun Chen, Donko Donjerkovic, Shilpa Lawande, Jussi Myllymaki, R. Kent Wenger. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, pages 301-312, May 1997. (ps.gz)

• Protecting the Quality of Service of Existing Information Systems. Kevin S. Beyer, Miron Livny, Raghu Ramakrishnan. In Proceedings of the Third IFCIS Conference on Cooperative Information Systems (CoopIS), pages 74-83, August 1998. (ps.gz)

• Immediate Propagate Deferred Apply for Incremental Maintenance of Materialized Views Kevin S. Beyer, Roberta Cochrane, Hamid Pirahesh, Richard Sidle, Jayavel Shanmugasundaram, C. Mohan, Kenneth Salem. Submitted for publication.