Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have shown great capacity on image generation, in which a discriminative model guides the training of a generative model to construct images that resemble real images. Recently, GANs have been extended from generating images to generating sequences (e.g., poems, music and codes). Existing GANs on sequence generation mainly focus on general sequences, which are grammar-free. In many real-world applications, however, we need to generate sequences in a formal language with the constraint of its corresponding grammar. For example, to test the performance of a database, one may want to generate a collection of SQL queries, which are not only similar to the queries of real users, but also follow the SQL syntax of the target database. Generating such sequences is highly challenging because both the generator and discriminator of GANs need to consider the structure of the sequences and the given grammar in the formal language. To address these issues, we study the problem of syntax-aware sequence generation with GANs, in which a collection of real sequences and a set of pre-defined grammatical rules are given to both discriminator and generator. We propose a novel GAN framework, namely TreeGAN, to incorporate a given Context-Free Grammar (CFG) into the sequence generation process. In TreeGAN, the generator employs a recurrent neural network (RNN) to construct a parse tree. Each generated parse tree can then be translated to a valid sequence of the given grammar. The discriminator uses a tree-structured RNN to distinguish the generated trees from real trees. We show that TreeGAN can generate sequences for any CFG and its generation fully conforms with the given syntax. Experiments on synthetic and real data sets demonstrated that TreeGAN significantly improves the quality of the sequence generation in context-free languages.

Huawei Fusion Insight Libr A (FI-MPPDB) is a petabyte scale enterprise analytics platform developed by the Huawei data-base group. It started as a prototype more than five years ago, and is now being used by many enterprise customers over the globe, including some of the world's largest financial institutions. Our product direction and enhancements have been mainly driven by customer requirements in the fast evolving Chinese market. This paper describes the architecture of FI-MPPDB and some of its major enhancements. In particular, we focus on top four requirements from our customers related to data analytics on the cloud: system availability, auto tuning, query over heterogeneous data models on the cloud, and the ability to utilize powerful modern hardware for good performance. We present our latest advancements in the above areas including online expansion, auto tuning in query optimizer, SQL on HDFS, and intelligent JIT compiled execution. Finally, we present some experimental results to demonstrate the effectiveness of these technologies.

Histograms have been extensively used for selectivity estimation by academics and have successfully been adopted by database industry. However, the estimation error is usually large for skewed distributions and biased attributes, which are typical in real-world data. Therefore, we propose effective models to quantitatively measure bias and selectivity based on information entropy. These models together with the principles of maximum entropy are then used to develop a class of entropy-based histograms. Moreover, since entropy can be computed incrementally, we present the incremental variations of our algorithms that reduce the complexities of the histogram construction from quadratic to linear. We conducted an extensive set of experiments with both synthetic and real-world datasets to compare the accuracy and efficiency of our proposed techniques with many other histogram-based techniques, showing the superiority of the entropy-based approaches for both equality and range queries.