Keyword search in XML repositories is a powerful tool for interactive data exploration. Much work has recently been done on making XML search aware of relationship information embedded in XML document structure, but without a clear winner in all data and query scenarios. Furthermore, due to its imprecise nature, search results cannot easily be analyzed and summarized to gain more insights into the data. We address these shortcomings with SEDA: a system for Search, Exploration, Discovery, and Analysis of XML Data. SEDA is based on a paradigm of search and user interaction to help users start with simple keyword-style querying and perform rich analysis of XML data by leveraging both the content and structure of the data. SEDA is an interactive system that allows the user to refine her query iteratively to explore the XML data and discover interesting relationships. SEDA first employs a top-k algorithm to compute the most relevant top-k answers fast, and returns tuples of nodes ranked by relevance. SEDA provides several novel data structures and techniques for efficient top-k computation over graph-structured XML data. SEDA also computes all the contexts in which the query terms are found and all the connection paths that connect the query terms in the XML data. These two summaries enable the user to refine her query by disambiguating the contexts and connections relevant to her query. With the user feedback, the system has enough information to compute all query results, not just the top-k. From the complete results, SEDA automatically deduces a star schema, which is then instantiated with the query results and augmented with additional values required for a well-defined data cube. The tables computed at this step are input into an OLAP engine for further analysis.

We study the problem of extracting flattened tuple data from streaming, hierarchical XML data. Tuple-extraction queries are essentially XML pattern queries with multiple extraction nodes. Their typical applications include mapping-based XML transformation and integrated (set-based) processing of XML and relational data. Holistic twig joins are known for the optimal matching of XML pattern queries on parsed/indexed XML data. Naïve application of the holistic twig joins to streaming XML data incurs unnecessary disk I/Os. We adapt the holistic twig joins for tuple-extraction queries on streaming XML with two novel features: first, we use the block-and-trigger technique to consume streaming XML data in a best-effort fashion without compromising the optimality of holistic matching; second, to reduce peak buffer sizes and overall running times, we apply query-path pruning and existential-match pruning techniques to aggressively filter irrelevant incoming data. We compare our solution with the direct competitor TurboXPath and other alternative approaches that use full-fledged query engines such as XQuery or XSLT engines for tuple extraction. The experiments using real-world XML data and queries demonstrated that our approach 1) outperformed its competitors by up to orders of magnitude, and 2) exhibited almost linear scalability. Our solution has been demonstrated extensively to IBM customers and will be included in customer engagement applications in healthcare.

Traditional query processing techniques based on static query optimization are ineffective in applications where statistics about the data are unavailable at the start of query execution or where the data characteristics are skewed and change dynamically. Several adaptive query processing techniques have been proposed in recent years to overcome the limitations of static query optimizers through either explicit re-optimization of plans during execution or by using a row-routing based approach. In this paper, we present a novel method for processing pipelined join plans that dynamically arranges the join order of both inner and outer-most tables at run-time. We extend the Eddies concept of "moments of symmetry" to reorder indexed nested-loop joins, the join method used by all commercial DBMSs for building pipelined query plans for applications for which low latencies are crucial. Unlike row-routing techniques, our approach achieves adaptability by changing the pipeline itself which avoids the bookkeeping and routing decision associated with each row. Operator selectivities monitored during query execution are used to change the execution plan at strategic points, and the change of execution plans utilizes a novel and efficient technique for avoiding duplicates in the query results. Our prototype implementation in a commercial DBMS shows a query execution speedup of up to 8 times.

XML has become one of the core technologies for contemporary business applications, especially web-based applications. To facilitate processing of diverse XML data, we propose an extensible, integrated XML processing architecture, the XML Virtual Machine (XVM), which connects XML data with their behaviors. At the same time, the XVM is also a framework for developing and deploying XML-based applications. Using component-based techniques, the XVM supports arbitrary granularity and provides a high degree of modularity and reusability. XVM components are dynamically loaded and composed during XML data processing. Using the XVM, both client-side and server-side XML applications can be developed and deployed in an integrated way. We also present an XML application container built on top of the XVM along with several sample applications to demonstrate the applicability of the XVM framework.

We have developed a new indexing strategy that helps overcome the curse of dimensionality for time series data. Our proposed approach, called skyline index, adopts new skyline bounding regions (SBR) to approximate and represent a group of time series data according to their collective shape. Skyline bounding regions allow us to define a distance function that tightly lower bounds the distance between a query and a group of time series data. In an extensive performance study, we investigate the impact of different distance functions by various dimensionality reduction and indexing techniques on the performance of similarity search, including index pages accessed, data objects fetched, and overall query processing time. In addition, we show that, for k-nearest neighbor queries, the proposed skyline index approach can be coupled with the state of the art dimensionality reduction techniques such as adaptive piecewise constant approximation (APCA) and improve its performance by up to a factor of 3.

Given explosive data trac in the world-wide web (WWW), it is crucial to achieve the scalable performance of web servers. The overall performance and resource utilization can be improved by spreading document requests among a group of web servers. This leads to the design and implementation of Distributed Cooperative Apache (#########)web server. In this paper, we describe the unique features of the ######### system (1) to migrate and replicate documents among cooperating servers, (2) using dynamic hyperlink generation to distribute requests for documents to balance the load, and (3) to maintain replicated copies in a consistent state. We also address the issue of storage management for more eective document replication under limited capacity. In the experiments, the ######### system demonstrated its ability to achieve high performance and scalability by eectively distributing load among a group of cooperating Apache servers and by eliminating hot spots and performance bottleneck with replicated documents. The ######### system is an eective and practical solution to provide high performance and scalability to cope with ever increasing demands from clients all over the web. ######### WWW, Scalable Web server, Apache, DCApache, Distributed Web server, Replication, Load balancing 1.