Distributed database systems provide a new data processing and storage technology for decentralized organizations of today. Query optimization, the process to generate an optimal execution plan for the posed query, is more challenging in such systems due to the huge search space of alternative plans incurred by distribution. As finding an optimal execution plan is computationally intractable, using stochastic-based algorithms has drawn the attention of most researchers. In this paper, for the first time, a multi-colony ant algorithm is proposed for optimizing join queries in a distributed environment where relations can be replicated but not fragmented. In the proposed algorithm, four types of ants collaborate to create an execution plan. Hence, there are four ant colonies in each iteration. Each type of ant makes an important decision to find the optimal plan. In order to evaluate the quality of the generated plan, two cost models are used-one based on the total time and the other on the response time. The proposed algorithm is compared with two previous genetic-based algorithms on chain, tree and cyclic queries. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm saves up to about 80 % of optimization time with no significant difference in the quality of generated plans compared with the best existing genetic-based algorithm.

No abstract

No abstract

Data exchange is the problem of transforming data that is structured under a source schema into data structured under another schema, called the target schema, so that both the source and target data satisfy the relationship between the schemas. Many applications such as planning, scheduling, medical and fraud detection systems, require data exchange in the context of temporal data. Even though the formal framework of data exchange for relational database systems is wellestablished, it does not immediately carry over to the settings of temporal data, which necessitates reasoning over unbounded periods of time.In this work, we study data exchange for temporal data. We first motivate the need for two views of temporal data: the concrete view, which depicts how temporal data is compactly represented and on which the implementations are based, and the abstract view, which defines the semantics of temporal data as a sequence of snapshots. We first extend the chase procedure for the abstract view to have a conceptual basis for the data exchange for temporal databases. Considering non-temporal source-to-target tuple generating dependencies and equality generating dependencies, the chase algorithm can be applied on each snapshot independently. Then we define a chase procedure (called c-chase) on concrete instances and show the result of c-chase on a concrete instance is semantically aligned with the result of chase on the corresponding abstract instance. In order to interpret intervals as constants while checking if a dependency or a query is satisfied by a concrete database, we will normalize the instance with respect to the dependency or the query. To obtain the semantic alignment, the nulls (which are introduced by data exchange and model incompleteness) in the concrete view are annotated with temporal information. Furthermore, we show that the result of the concrete chase provides a foundation for query answering. We define naïve evaluation on the result of the c-chase and show it produces certain answers.