Tools for generating test queries for databases do not explicitly take into account the actual data in the database. As a consequence, such tools cannot guarantee suitable coverage of test cases commonly required for database testing. In this paper, we investigate the problem of generating queries that satisfy cardinality constraints on intermediate subexpressions when executed on a given test database. Such queries are required to test the performance of a database system under different operating conditionsWe formally analyze this problem, quantify its difficulty and follow up this analysis with a description of a practical algorithm which utilizes sampling and space pruning techniques to quickly generate test queries that have desired properties. We present the results of an experimental evaluation of our approach as implemented in an open source data manager, demonstrating the utility of our proposal.

Dependencies play an important role in databases. We study order dependencies (ODs)-and unidirectional order dependencies (UODs), a proper sub-class of ODs-which describe the relationships among lexicographical orderings of sets of tuples. We consider lexicographical ordering, as by the order-by operator in SQL, because this is the notion of order used in SQL and within query optimization. Our main goal is to investigate the inference problem for ODs, both in theory and in practice. We show the usefulness of ODs in query optimization. We establish the following theoretical results: (i) a hierarchy of order dependency classes; (ii) a proof of co-NP-completeness of the inference problem for the subclass of UODs (and ODs); (iii) a proof of co-NP-completeness of the inference problem of functional dependencies (FDs) from ODs in general, but demonstrate linear time complexity for the inference of FDs from UODs; (iv) a sound and complete elimination procedure for inference over ODs; and (v) a sound and complete polynomial inference algorithm for sets of UODs over restricted domains.

Outerjoins are an important class of joins and are widely used in various kinds of applications. It is challenging to optimize queries that contain outerjoins because outerjoins do not always commute with inner joins. Previous work has studied this problem and provided techniques that allow certain reordering of the join sequences. However, the optimization of outerjoin queries is still not as powerful as that of inner joins.An inner join query can always be canonically represented as a sequence of Cartesian products of all relations, followed by a sequence of selection operations, each applying a conjunct in the join predicates. This canonical abstraction is very powerful because it enables the optimizer to use any join sequence for plan generation. Unfortunately, such a canonical abstraction for outerjoin queries has not been developed. As a result, existing techniques always exclude certain join sequences from planning, which can lead to a severe performance penalty.Given a query consisting of a sequence of inner and outer joins, we, for the first time, present a canonical abstraction based on three operations: outer Cartesian products, nullification, and best match. Like the inner join abstraction, our outerjoin abstraction permits all join sequences, and preserves the property of both commutativity and transitivity among predicates. This allows us to generate plans that are very desirable for performance reasons but that couldn't be done before. We present an algorithm that produces such a canonical abstraction, and a method that extends an inner-join optimizer to generate plans in an expanded search space. We also describe an efficient implementation of the best match operation using the OLAP funtionalities in SQL:1999. Our experimental results show that our technique can significantly improve the performance of outerjoin queries.

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