Most fault localization techniques take as input a faulty program, and produce as output a ranked list of suspicious code locations at which the program may be defective. When researchers propose a new fault localization technique, they typically evaluate it on programs with known faults. The technique is scored based on where in its output list the defective code appears. This enables the comparison of multiple fault localization techniques to determine which one is better. Previous research has evaluated fault localization techniques using artificial faults, generated either by mutation tools or manually. In other words, previous research has determined which fault localization techniques are best at finding artificial faults. However, it is not known which fault localization techniques are best at finding real faults. It is not obvious that the answer is the same, given previous work showing that artificial faults have both similarities to and differences from real faults. We performed a replication study to evaluate 10 claims in the literature that compared fault localization techniques (from the spectrum-based and mutation-based families). We used 2995 artificial faults in 6 real-world programs. Our results support 7 of the previous claims as statistically significant, but only 3 as having non-negligible effect sizes. Then, we evaluated the same 10 claims, using 310 real faults from the 6 programs. Every previous result was refuted or was statistically and practically insignificant. Our experiments show that artificial faults are not useful for predicting which fault localization techniques perform best on real faults. In light of these results, we identified a design space that includes many previously-studied fault localization techniques as well as hundreds of new techniques. We experimentally determined which factors in the design space are most important, using an overall set of 395 real faults. Then, we extended this design space with new techniques. Several of our novel techniques outperform all existing techniques, notably in terms of ranking defective code in the top-5 or top-10 reports.

Fault localization (FL) takes as input a faulty program and produces as output a list of code locations ranked by probability of being defective. A programmer doing debugging, or a program repair tool, could save time by focusing on the most suspicious locations.

There are known benchmarks for the performance evaluation of relational and XML databases. However, there is an increasing demand for database applications that require access to heterogeneous loosely-coupled distributed data sources . This paper presents a hybrid benchmark based on TPC-H where the data sources are heterogeneous. Specifically, the paper describes the design of the relational and XML data sources as well as the query redesign in the LINQ query language , which supports queries over heterogeneous data sources. The results of a performance evaluation of the hybrid benchmark over various database products is included for untyped and typed XML with and without clearing the database cache .

Similarity Joins are recognized among the most useful data processing and analysis operations and are extensively used in multiple application domains. They retrieve all data pairs whose distances are smaller than a predefined threshold ε. Multiple Similarity Join algorithms and implementation techniques have been proposed. They range from out-of-database approaches for only in-memory and external memory data to techniques that make use of standard database operators to answer similarity joins. Recent work has shown that this operation can be efficiently implemented as a physical database operator. However, the proposed operator only support 1D numeric data. This paper presents DBSimJoin , a physical Similarity Join database operator for datasets that lie in any metric space. DBSimJoin is a non-blocking operator that prioritizes the early generation of results. We implemented the proposed operator in PostgreSQL, an open source database system. We show how this operator can be used in multiple real-world data analysis scenarios with multiple data types and distance functions. Particularly, we show the use of DBSimJoin to identify similar images represented as feature vectors, and similar publications in a bibliographic database. We also show that DBSimJoin scales very well when important parameters, e.g., e, data size, increase.