Optimizing similarity queries in metric spaces meeting user's expectation

Abstract

The complexity of data stored in large databases has increased at very fast paces. Hence, operations more elaborated than traditional queries are essential in order to extract all required information from the database. Therefore, the interest of the database community in similarity search has increased significantly. Two of the well-known types of similarity search are the Range (Rq) and the k-Nearest Neighbor (kNNq) queries, which, as any of the traditional ones, can be sped up by indexing structures of the Database Management System (DBMS). Another way of speeding up queries is to perform query optimization. In this process, metrics about data are collected and employed to adjust the parameters of the search algorithms in each query execution. However, although the integration of similarity search into DBMS has begun to be deeply studied more recently, the query optimization has been developed and employed just to answer traditional queries.The execution of similarity queries, even using efficient indexing structures, tends to present higher computational cost than the execution of traditional ones. Two strategies can be applied to speed up the execution of any query, and thus they are worth to employ to answer also similarity queries. The first strategy is query rewriting based on algebraic properties and cost functions. The second technique is when external query factors are applied, such as employing the semantic expected by the user, to prune the answer space. This thesis aims at contributing to the development of novel techniques to improve the similarity-based query optimization processing, exploiting both algebraic properties and semantic restrictions as query refinements.