Applications in which plain text coexists with structured data are pervasive. Commercial relational database management systems (RDBMSs) generally provide querying capabilities for text attributes that incorporate state-of-the-art information retrieval (IR) relevance ranking strategies, but this search functionality requires that queries specify the exact column or columns against which a given list of keywords is to be matched. This requirement can be cumbersome and inflexible from a user perspective: good answers to a keyword query might need to be "assembled" -in perhaps unforeseen ways-by joining tuples from multiple relations. This observation has motivated recent research on free-form keyword search over RDBMSs. In this paper, we adapt IR-style document-relevance ranking strategies to the problem of processing free-form keyword queries over RDBMSs. Our query model can handle queries with both AND and OR semantics, and exploits the sophisticated single-column text-search functionality often available in commercial RDBMSs. We develop query-processing strategies that build on a crucial characteristic of IR-style keyword search: only the few most relevant matches -according to some definition of "relevance"-are generally of interest. Consequently, rather than computing all matches for a keyword query, which leads to inefficient executions, our techniques focus on the top-k matches for the query, for moderate values of k. A thorough experimental evaluation over real data shows the performance advantages of our approach. *

Keyword search is a proven, user-friendly way to query HTML documents in the World Wide Web. We propose keyword search in XML documents, modeled as labeled trees, and describe corresponding efficient algorithms. The proposed keyword search returns the set of smallest trees containing all keywords, where a tree is designated as "smallest" if it contains no tree that also contains all keywords. Our core contribution, the Indexed Lookup Eager algorithm, exploits key properties of smallest trees in order to outperform prior algorithms by orders of magnitude when the query contains keywords with significantly different frequencies. The Scan Eager variant is tuned for the case where the keywords have similar frequencies. We analytically and experimentally evaluate two variants of the Eager algorithm, along with the Stack algorithm [13]. We also present the XKSearch system, which utilizes the Indexed Lookup Eager, Scan Eager and Stack algorithms and a demo of which on DBLP data is available at http://www.db.ucsd.edu/projects/xksearch. Finally, we extend the Indexed Lookup Eager algorithm to answer Lowest Common Ancestor (LCA) queries.

Exploring the inherent technical challenges in realizing the potential of Big Data.

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