Data-intensive analytical applications need to support both efficient reads and writes. However, what is usually a good data layout for an update-heavy workload, is not well-suited for a read-mostly one and vice versa. Modern analytical data systems rely on columnar layouts and employ delta stores to inject new data and updates. We show that for hybrid workloads we can achieve close to one order of magnitude better performance by tailoring the column layout design to the data and query workload. Our approach navigates the possible design space of the physical layout: it organizes each column's data by determining the number of partitions, their corresponding sizes and ranges, and the amount of buffer space and how it is allocated. We frame these design decisions as an optimization problem that, given workload knowledge and performance requirements, provides an optimal physical layout for the workload at hand. To evaluate this work, we build an in-memory storage engine, Casper, and we show that it outperforms state-of-the-art data layouts of analytical systems for hybrid workloads. Casper delivers up to 2.32x higher throughput for update-intensive workloads and up to 2.14x higher throughput for hybrid workloads. We further show how to make data layout decisions robust to workload variation by carefully selecting the input of the optimization.

Multicore CPUs and cheap co-processors such as GPUs create opportunities for vastly accelerating database queries. However, given the differences in their threading models, expected granularities of parallelism, and memory subsystems, effectively utilising all cores with all co-processors for an intensive query is very difficult. This paper introduces a novel templating methodology to create portable, yet architecture-aware, algorithms. We apply this methodology on the very compute-intensive task of calculating the *skycube*, a materialisation of exponentially many skyline query results, which finds applications in data exploration and multi-criteria decision making. We define three parallel templates, two that leverage insights from previous skycube research and a third that exploits a novel point-based paradigm to expose more data parallelism. An experimental study shows that, relative to the state-of-the-art that does not parallelise well due to its memory and cache requirements, our algorithms provide an order of magnitude improvement on either architecture and proportionately improve as more GPUs are added.

The skyline is an important query operator for multi-criteria decision making. It reduces a dataset to only those points that offer optimal trade-offs of dimensions. In general, it is very expensive to compute. Recently, multicore CPU algorithms have been proposed to accelerate the computation of the skyline. However, they do not sufficiently minimize dominance tests and so are not competitive with state-of-the-art sequential algorithms. In this paper, we introduce a novel multicore skyline algorithm, Hybrid, which processes points in blocks. It maintains a shared, global skyline among all threads, which is used to minimize dominance tests while maintaining high throughput. The algorithm uses an efficiently-updatable data structure over the shared, global skyline, based on point-based partitioning. Also, we release a large benchmark of optimized skyline algorithms, with which we demonstrate on challenging workloads a 100-fold speedup over state-of-the-art multicore algorithms and a 10-fold speedup with 16 cores over state-of-the-art sequential algorithms.

The skyline operator returns records in a dataset that provide optimal trade-offs of multiple dimensions. State-of-the-art skyline computation involves complex tree traversals, data-ordering, and conditional branching to minimize the number of point-to-point comparisons. Meanwhile, GPGPU computing offers the potential for parallelizing skyline computation across thousands of cores. However, attempts to port skyline algorithms to the GPU have prioritized throughput and failed to outperform sequential algorithms. In this paper, we introduce a new skyline algorithm, designed for the GPU, that uses a global, static partitioning scheme. With the partitioning, we can permit controlled branching to exploit transitive relationships and avoid most point-to-point comparisons. The result is a non-traditional GPU algorithm, SkyAlign, that prioritizes work-efficiency and respectable throughput, rather than maximal throughput, to achieve orders of magnitude faster performance.

The skyline operator returns records in a dataset that provide optimal trade-offs of multiple dimensions. It is an expensive operator whose query performance can greatly benefit from materialization. However, a skyline can be executed over any subspace of dimensions, and the materialization of all subspace skylines, called the skycube, dramatically multiplies data size. Existing methods for skycube compression sacrifice too much query performance; so, we present a novel hashing- and bitstring-based compressed data structure that supports orders of magnitude faster query performance.

Danish is a major Scandinavian language spoken daily by around six million people.However, it lacks a unified, open set of NLP tools.This demonstration will introduce DKIE, an extensible open-source toolkit for processing Danish text.We implement an information extraction architecture for Danish within GATE, including integrated third-party tools.This implementation includes the creation of a substantial set of corpus annotations for dataintensive named entity recognition.The final application and dataset is made are openly available, and the part-of-speech tagger and NER model also operate independently or with the Stanford NLP toolkit.

The skyline operator for multi-criteria search returns the most interesting points of a data set with respect to any monotone preference function. Existing work has almost exclusively focused on efficiently computing skylines on one or more CPUs, ignoring the high parallelism possible in GPUs. In this paper we investigate the challenges for efficient skyline algorithms that exploit the computational power of the GPU. We present a novel strategy for managing data transfer and memory for skylines using CPU and GPU. Our new sorting based data-parallel skyline algorithm is introduced and its properties are discussed. We demonstrate in a thorough experimental evaluation that this algorithm is faster than state-of-the-art sequential sorting based skyline algorithms and that it shows superior scalability.

The notion of point-of-interest (PoI) has existed since paper road maps began to include markings of useful places such as gas stations, hotels, and tourist attractions. With the introduction of geopositioned mobile devices such as smartphones and mapping services such as Google Maps, the retrieval of PoIs relevant to a user's intent has became a problem of automated spatio-textual information retrieval. Over the last several years, substantial research has gone into the invention of functionality and efficient implementations for retrieving nearby PoIs. However, with a couple of exceptions existing proposals retrieve results at single-PoI granularity. We assume that a mobile device user issues queries consisting of keywords and an automatically supplied geo-position, and we target the common case where the user wishes to find nearby groups of PoIs that are relevant to the keywords. Such groups are relevant to users who wish to conveniently explore several options before making a decision such as to purchase a specific product. Specifically, we demonstrate a practical proposal for finding top- k PoI groups in response to a query. We show how problem parameter settings can be mapped to options that are meaningful to users. Further, although this kind of functionality is prone to combinatorial explosion, we will demonstrate that the functionality can be supported efficiently in practical settings.