F1 Query is a stand-alone, federated query processing platform that executes SQL queries against data stored in different file-based formats as well as different storage systems at Google (e.g., Bigtable, Spanner, Google Spreadsheets, etc.). F1 Query eliminates the need to maintain the traditional distinction between different types of data processing workloads by simultaneously supporting: (i) OLTP-style point queries that affect only a few records; (ii) low-latency OLAP querying of large amounts of data; and (iii) large ETL pipelines. F1 Query has also significantly reduced the need for developing hard-coded data processing pipelines by enabling declarative queries integrated with custom business logic. F1 Query satisfies key requirements that are highly desirable within Google: (i) it provides a unified view over data that is fragmented and distributed over multiple data sources; (ii) it leverages datacenter resources for performant query processing with high throughput and low latency; (iii) it provides high scalability for large data sizes by increasing computational parallelism; and (iv) it is extensible and uses innovative approaches to integrate complex business logic in declarative query processing. This paper presents the end-to-end design of F1 Query. Evolved out of F1, the distributed database originally built to manage Google's advertising data, F1 Query has been in production for multiple years at Google and serves the querying needs of a large number of users and systems.

The problem of scaling up data integration, such that new sources can be quickly utilized as they are discovered, remains elusive: global schemas for integrated data are difficult to develop and expand, and schema and record matching techniques are limited by the fact that data and metadata are often under-specified and must be disambiguated by data experts. One promising approach is to avoid using a global schema, and instead to develop keyword search-based data integration--where the system lazily discovers associations enabling it to join together matches to keywords, and return ranked results. The user is expected to understand the data domain and provide feedback about answers' quality. The system generalizes such feedback to learn how to correctly integrate data. A major open challenge is that under this model, the user only sees and offers feedback on a few "top- k " results: this result set must be carefully selected to include answers of high relevance and answers that are highly informative when feedback is given on them. Existing systems merely focus on predicting relevance, by composing the scores of various schema and record matching algorithms. In this paper we show how to predict the uncertainty associated with a query result's score, as well as how informative feedback is on a given result. We build upon these foundations to develop an active learning approach to keyword search-based data integration, and we validate the effectiveness of our solution over real data from several very different domains.

Edit distance based string similarity join is a fundamental operator in string databases. Increasingly, many applications in data cleaning, data integration, and scientific computing have to deal with fuzzy information in string attributes. Despite the intensive efforts devoted in processing (deterministic) string joins and managing probabilistic data respectively, modeling and processing probabilistic strings is still a largely unexplored territory. This work studies the string join problem in probabilistic string databases, using the expected edit distance (EED) as the similarity measure. We first discuss two probabilistic string models to capture the fuzziness in string values in real-world applications. The string-level model is complete, but may be expensive to represent and process. The character-level model has a much more succinct representation when uncertainty in strings only exists at certain positions. Since computing the EED between two probabilistic strings is prohibitively expensive, we have designed efficient and effective pruning techniques that can be easily implemented in existing relational database engines for both models. Extensive experiments on real data have demonstrated order-of-magnitude improvements of our approaches over the baseline.