Federated Query Processing Research Articles

XDB in Action: Decentralized Cross-Database Query Processing for Black-Box DBMSes

Data are naturally produced at different locations and hence stored on different DBMSes. To maximize the value of the collected data, today's users combine data from different sources. Research in data integration has proposed the Mediator-Wrapper (MW) architecture to enable ad-hoc querying processing over multiple sources. The MW approach is desirable for users, as they do not need to deal with heterogeneous data sources. However, from a query processing perspective, the MW approach is inefficient: First, one needs to provision the mediating execution engine with resources. Second, during query processing, data gets "centralized" within the mediating engine, which causes redundant data movement. Recently, we proposed in-situ cross-database query processing , a paradigm for federated query processing without a mediating engine. Our approach optimizes runtime performance and reduces data movement by leveraging existing systems, eliminating the need for an additional federated query engine. In this demonstration, we showcase XDB, our prototype for in-situ cross-database query processing. We demonstrate several aspects of XDB, i.e. the cross-database environment, our optimization techniques, and its decentralized execution phase.

Characteristic sets profile features: Estimation and application to SPARQL query planning

RDF dataset profiling is the task of extracting a formal representation of a dataset’s features. Such features may cover various aspects of the RDF dataset ranging from information on licensing and provenance to statistical descriptors of the data distribution and its semantics. In this work, we focus on the characteristics sets profile features that capture both structural and semantic information of an RDF dataset, making them a valuable resource for different downstream applications. While previous research demonstrated the benefits of characteristic sets in centralized and federated query processing, access to these fine-grained statistics is taken for granted. However, especially in federated query processing, computing this profile feature is challenging as it can be difficult and/or costly to access and process the entire data from all federation members. We address this shortcoming by introducing the concept of a profile feature estimation and propose a sampling-based approach to generate estimations for the characteristic sets profile feature. In addition, we showcase the applicability of these feature estimations in federated querying by proposing a query planning approach that is specifically designed to leverage these feature estimations. In our first experimental study, we intrinsically evaluate our approach on the representativeness of the feature estimation. The results show that even small samples of just 0.5 % of the original graph’s entities allow for estimating both structural and statistical properties of the characteristic sets profile features. Our second experimental study extrinsically evaluates the estimations by investigating their applicability in our query planner using the well-known FedBench benchmark. The results of the experiments show that the estimated profile features allow for obtaining efficient query plans.

A geospatial source selector for federated GeoSPARQL querying.

Background: Geospatial linked data brings into the scope of the Semantic Web and its technologies, a wealth of datasets that combine semantically-rich descriptions of resources with their geo-location. There are, however, various Semantic Web technologies where technical work is needed in order to achieve the full integration of geospatial data, and federated query processing is one of these technologies. Methods: In this paper, we explore the idea of annotating data sources with a bounding polygon that summarizes the spatial extent of the resources in each data source, and of using such a summary as an (additional) source selection criterion in order to reduce the set of sources that will be tested as potentially holding relevant data. We present our source selection method, and we discuss its correctness and implementation. Results: We evaluate the proposed source selection using three different types of summaries with different degrees of accuracy, against not using geospatial summaries. We use datasets and queries from a practical use case that combines crop-type data with water availability data for food security. The experimental results suggest that more complex summaries lead to slower source selection times, but also to more precise exclusion of unneeded sources. Moreover, we observe the source selection runtime is (partially or fully) recovered by shorter planning and execution runtimes. As a result, the federated sources are not burdened by pointless querying from the federation engine. Conclusions: The evaluation draws on data and queries from the agroenvironmental domain and shows that our source selection method substantially improves the effectiveness of federated GeoSPARQL query processing.

A geospatial source selector for federated GeoSPARQL querying

Background: Geospatial linked data brings into the scope of the Semantic Web and its technologies, a wealth of datasets that combine semantically-rich descriptions of resources with their geo-location. There are, however, various Semantic Web technologies where technical work is needed in order to achieve the full integration of geospatial data, and federated query processing is one of these technologies. Methods: In this paper, we explore the idea of annotating data sources with a bounding polygon that summarizes the spatial extent of the resources in each data source, and of using such a summary as an (additional) source selection criterion in order to reduce the set of sources that will be tested as potentially holding relevant data. We present our source selection method, and we discuss its correctness and implementation. Results: We evaluate the proposed source selection using three different types of summaries with different degrees of accuracy, against not using geospatial summaries. We use datasets and queries from a practical use case that combines crop-type data with water availability data for food security. The experimental results suggest that more complex summaries lead to slower source selection times, but also to more precise exclusion of unneeded sources. Moreover, we observe the source selection runtime is (partially or fully) recovered by shorter planning and execution runtimes. As a result, the federated sources are not burdened by pointless querying from the federation engine. Conclusions: The evaluation draws on data and queries from the agroenvironmental domain and shows that our source selection method substantially improves the effectiveness of federated GeoSPARQL query processing.

F1 query

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.

Lusail

The RDF data model allows publishing interlinked RDF datasets, where each dataset is independently maintained and is queryable via a SPARQL endpoint. Many applications would benefit from querying the resulting large, decentralized, geo-distributed graph through a federated SPARQL query processor. A crucial factor for good performance in federated query processing is pushing as much computation as possible to the local endpoints. Surprisingly, existing federated SPARQL engines are not effective at this task since they rely only on schema information. Consequently, they cause unnecessary data retrieval and communication, leading to poor scalability and response time. This paper addresses these limitations and presents Lusail , a scalable and efficient federated SPARQL system for querying large RDF graphs that are geo-distributed on different endpoints. Lusail uses a novel query rewriting algorithm to push computation to the local endpoints by relying on information about the RDF instances and not only the schema. The query rewriting algorithm has the additional advantage of exposing parallelism in query processing, which Lusail exploits through advanced scheduling at query run time. Our experiments on billions of triples of real and synthetic data show that Lusail outperforms state-of-the-art systems by orders of magnitude in terms of scalability and response time.

BioFed: federated query processing over life sciences linked open data

BackgroundBiomedical data, e.g. from knowledge bases and ontologies, is increasingly made available following open linked data principles, at best as RDF triple data. This is a necessary step towards unified access to biological data sets, but this still requires solutions to query multiple endpoints for their heterogeneous data to eventually retrieve all the meaningful information. Suggested solutions are based on query federation approaches, which require the submission of SPARQL queries to endpoints. Due to the size and complexity of available data, these solutions have to be optimised for efficient retrieval times and for users in life sciences research. Last but not least, over time, the reliability of data resources in terms of access and quality have to be monitored. Our solution (BioFed) federates data over 130 SPARQL endpoints in life sciences and tailors query submission according to the provenance information. BioFed has been evaluated against the state of the art solution FedX and forms an important benchmark for the life science domain.MethodsThe efficient cataloguing approach of the federated query processing system ’BioFed’, the triple pattern wise source selection and the semantic source normalisation forms the core to our solution. It gathers and integrates data from newly identified public endpoints for federated access. Basic provenance information is linked to the retrieved data. Last but not least, BioFed makes use of the latest SPARQL standard (i.e., 1.1) to leverage the full benefits for query federation. The evaluation is based on 10 simple and 10 complex queries, which address data in 10 major and very popular data sources (e.g., Dugbank, Sider).ResultsBioFed is a solution for a single-point-of-access for a large number of SPARQL endpoints providing life science data. It facilitates efficient query generation for data access and provides basic provenance information in combination with the retrieved data. BioFed fully supports SPARQL 1.1 and gives access to the endpoint’s availability based on the EndpointData graph. Our evaluation of BioFed against FedX is based on 20 heterogeneous federated SPARQL queries and shows competitive execution performance in comparison to FedX, which can be attributed to the provision of provenance information for the source selection.ConclusionDeveloping and testing federated query engines for life sciences data is still a challenging task. According to our findings, it is advantageous to optimise the source selection. The cataloguing of SPARQL endpoints, including type and property indexing, leads to efficient querying of data resources over the Web of Data. This could even be further improved through the use of ontologies, e.g., for abstract normalisation of query terms.

Decomposing Federated Queries in Presence of Replicated Fragments

Federated query engines allow for linked data consumption using SPARQL endpoints. Replicating data fragments from different sources enables data re-organization and provides the basis for more effective and efficient federated query processing. However, existing federated query engines are not designed to support replication. In this paper, we propose a replication-aware framework named LILAC, sparqL query decomposItion against federations of repLicAted data sourCes, that relies on replicated fragment descriptions to accurately identify sources that provide replicated data. We dened the query decomposition problem with fragment replication (QDP-FR). QDP-FR corresponds to the problem of finding the sub-queries to be sent to the endpoints that allows the federated query engine to compute the query answer, while the number of tuples to be transferred from endpoints to the federated query engine is minimized. An approximation of QDP-FR is implemented by the LILAC replication-aware query decomposition algorithm. Further, LILAC techniques have been included in the state-of-the-art federated query engines FedX and ANAPSID to evaluate the benefits of the proposed source selection and query decomposition techniques in different engines. Experimental results suggest that LILAC efficiently.

Decomposing federated queries in presence of replicated fragments

Federated query engines allow for linked data consumption using SPARQL endpoints. Replicating data fragments from different sources enables data re-organization and provides the basis for more effective and efficient federated query processing. However, existing federated query engines are not designed to support replication. In this paper, we propose a replication-aware framework named LILAC, sparqL query decomposItion against federations of repLicAted data sourCes, that relies on replicated fragment descriptions to accurately identify sources that provide replicated data. We defined the query decomposition problem with fragment replication (QDP-FR). QDP-FR corresponds to the problem of finding the sub-queries to be sent to the endpoints that allows the federated query engine to compute the query answer, while the number of tuples to be transferred from endpoints to the federated query engine is minimized. An approximation of QDP-FR is implemented by the LILAC replication-aware query decomposition algorithm. Further, LILAC techniques have been included in the state-of-the-art federated query engines FedX and ANAPSID to evaluate the benefits of the proposed source selection and query decomposition techniques in different engines. Experimental results suggest that LILAC efficiently solves QDP-FR and is able to reduce the number of transferred tuples and the execution time of the studied engines.

A fine-grained evaluation of SPARQL endpoint federation systems

The Web of Data has grown enormously over the last years. Currently, it comprises a large compendium of interlinked and distributed datasets from multiple domains. Running complex queries on this compendium often requires accessing data from different endpoints within one query. The abundance of da tasets and the need for running complex query has thus motivated a considerable body of work on SPARQL query federation systems, the dedicated means to access data distributed over the Web of Data. However, the granularity of previous evaluations of such systems has not allowed deriving of insights concerning their behavior in different steps involved during federated query processing. In this work, we perform extensive experiments to compare state-of-the-art SPARQL endpoint federation systems using the comprehensive performance evaluation framework FedBench. In addition to considering the tradition query runtime as an evaluation criterion, we extend the scope of our performance evaluation by considering criteria, which have not been paid much attention to in previous studies. In particular, we consider the number of sources selected, the total number of SPARQL ASK requests used, the completeness of answers as well as the source selection time. Yet, we show that they have a significant impact on the overall query runtime of existing systems. Moreover, we extend FedBench to mirror a highly distributed data environment and assess the behavior of existing systems by using the same performance criteria. As the result we provide a detailed analysis of the experimental outcomes that reveal novel insights for improving current and future SPARQL federation systems.

Linking Health Records for Federated Query Processing

Abstract A federated query portal in an electronic health record infrastructure enables large epidemiology studies by combining data from geographically dispersed medical institutions. However, an individual’s health record has been found to be distributed across multiple carrier databases in local settings. Privacy regulations may prohibit a data source from revealing clear text identifiers, thereby making it non-trivial for a query aggregator to determine which records correspond to the same underlying individual. In this paper, we explore this problem of privately detecting and tracking the health records of an individual in a distributed infrastructure. We begin with a secure set intersection protocol based on commutative encryption, and show how to make it practical on comparison spaces as large as 1010 pairs. Using bigram matching, precomputed tables, and data parallelism, we successfully reduced the execution time to a matter of minutes, while retaining a high degree of accuracy even in records with data entry errors. We also propose techniques to prevent the inference of identifier information when knowledge of underlying data distributions is known to an adversary. Finally, we discuss how records can be tracked utilizing the detection results during query processing.

Federated query processing on linked data: a qualitative survey and open challenges

AbstractA large number of data providers publish and connect their structured data on the Web as linked data. Thus, the Web of data becomes a global data space. In this paper, we initially give an overview of query processing approaches used in this interlinked and distributed environment, and then focus on federated query processing on linked data. We provide a detailed and clear insight on data source selection, join methods and query optimization methods of existing query federation engines. Furthermore, we present a qualitative comparison of these engines and give a complementary comparison of the measured metrics of each engine with the idea of pointing out the major strengths of each one. Finally, we discuss the major challenges of federated query processing on linked data.

TopFed: TCGA tailored federated query processing and linking to LOD.

BackgroudThe Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) is a multidisciplinary, multi-institutional effort to catalogue genetic mutations responsible for cancer using genome analysis techniques. One of the aims of this project is to create a comprehensive and open repository of cancer related molecular analysis, to be exploited by bioinformaticians towards advancing cancer knowledge. However, devising bioinformatics applications to analyse such large dataset is still challenging, as it often requires downloading large archives and parsing the relevant text files. Therefore, it is making it difficult to enable virtual data integration in order to collect the critical co-variates necessary for analysis.MethodsWe address these issues by transforming the TCGA data into the Semantic Web standard Resource Description Format (RDF), link it to relevant datasets in the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud and further propose an efficient data distribution strategy to host the resulting 20.4 billion triples data via several SPARQL endpoints. Having the TCGA data distributed across multiple SPARQL endpoints, we enable biomedical scientists to query and retrieve information from these SPARQL endpoints by proposing a TCGA tailored federated SPARQL query processing engine named TopFed.ResultsWe compare TopFed with a well established federation engine FedX in terms of source selection and query execution time by using 10 different federated SPARQL queries with varying requirements. Our evaluation results show that TopFed selects on average less than half of the sources (with 100% recall) with query execution time equal to one third to that of FedX.ConclusionWith TopFed, we aim to offer biomedical scientists a single-point-of-access through which distributed TCGA data can be accessed in unison. We believe the proposed system can greatly help researchers in the biomedical domain to carry out their research effectively with TCGA as the amount and diversity of data exceeds the ability of local resources to handle its retrieval and parsing.

Third Party Data Protection Applied To Cloud and Xacml Implementation in the Hadoop Environment With Sparql

Cloud computing security (sometimes referred to simply as security) is an evolving sub- domain of Computer security, Network security and, more broadly, Information security It refers to a broad set of policies, technologies, and controls deployed to protect data, applications, and the associated infrastructure of cloud computing. Cloud security is not to be confused with security software offerings that are cloud-based (a.k.a. security-as-a-service).There are a number of security issues/concerns associated with cloud computing but these issues fall into two broad categories: Security issues faced by cloud providers (organizations providing software, platform, or infrastructure as a service via the cloud) and security issues faced by their customers. In most cases, the provider must ensure that their infrastructure is secure and that their clients' data and applications are protected while the customer must ensure that the provider has taken the proper security measures to protect their information. The extensive use of virtualization in implementing cloud infrastructure brings unique security concerns for customers or tenants of a public cloud service. Virtualization alters the relationship between the OS and underlying hardware - be it computing, storage or even networking. This introduces an additional layer - virtualization - that itself must be properly configured, managed and secured .Specific concerns include the potential to compromise the virtualization software, or hyper visor. While these concerns are largely theoretical, they do exist. Cloud computing offers great potential to improve productivity and reduce costs, but at the same time it possesses many security risks. In this paper we identify the possible security attacks on clouds including: Denial of Service attack, Authentication attack Man-in-the Middle attack, Wrapping attacks, Malware-Injection attacks, Flooding attacks, Browser attacks, and also Accountability checking problems. We identify the root causes of these attacks and propose specific solutions. In this paper, the authors discuss security issues for cloud computing and present a layered framework for secure clouds and then focus on two of the layers, i.e., the storage layer and the data layer. In particular, the authors discuss a scheme for secure third party publications of documents in a cloud. Next, the paper will converse secure federated query processing with map Reduce and Hardtop, and discuss the use of secure co-processors for cloud computing. Finally, the authors discuss XACML implementation for Hardtop and discuss their beliefs that building trusted applications from untrusted components will be a major aspect of secure cloud computing. Keywords : Accountability, Authentication attacks, Computer security, Cloud Computing, Flooding attacks, Hypervisor, Virtualization, Wrapping attacks, Browser attacks, secure clouds.

Security Issues for Cloud Computing

In this paper, the authors discuss security issues for cloud computing and present a layered framework for secure clouds and then focus on two of the layers, i.e., the storage layer and the data layer. In particular, the authors discuss a scheme for secure third party publications of documents in a cloud. Next, the paper will converse secure federated query processing with map Reduce and Hadoop, and discuss the use of secure co-processors for cloud computing. Finally, the authors discuss XACML implementation for Hadoop and discuss their beliefs that building trusted applications from untrusted components will be a major aspect of secure cloud computing.

Semi-automated schema integration with SASMINT

The emergence of increasing number of collaborating organizations has made clear the need for supporting interoperability infrastructures, enabling sharing and exchange of data among organizations. Schema matching and schema integration are the crucial components of the interoperability infrastructures, and their semi-automation to interrelate or integrate heterogeneous and autonomous databases in collaborative networks is desired. The Semi-Automatic Schema Matching and INTegration (SASMINT) System introduced in this paper identifies and resolves several important syntactic, semantic, and structural conflicts among schemas of relational databases to find their likely matches automatically. Furthermore, after getting the user validation on the matched results, it proposes an integrated schema. SASMINT uses a combination of a variety of metrics and algorithms from the Natural Language Processing and Graph Theory domains for its schema matching. For the schema integration, it utilizes a number of derivation rules defined in the scope of the research work explained in this paper. Furthermore, a derivation language called SASMINT Derivation Markup Language (SDML) is defined for capturing and formulating both the results of matching and the integration that can be further used, for example for federated query processing from independent databases. In summary, the paper focuses on addressing: (1) conflicts among schemas that make automatic schema matching and integration difficult, (2) the main components of the SASMINT approach and system, (3) in-depth exploration of SDML, (4) heuristic rules designed and implemented as part of the schema integration component of the SASMINT system, and (5) experimental evaluation of SASMINT.

Improving parallelism of federated query processing

Many large enterprises require access to distributed databases for business intelligence (BI) applications. Typically, distributed database are integrated into a centralized data warehouse for the benefit of easy maintenance. However, this approach needs to overcome the complexity of data loading and job scheduling as well as scalability issues. On the other hand, the approach of a fully federated system may not be feasible for data-intensive BI applications. The hybrid approach via intelligent data placement is more flexible and applicable than centralized or full-federation configurations. The current implementation of the hybrid approach to integrating distributed databases is to aggregate selected data from various remote sources as materialized views and cache them at the federation server to improve the performance of complex BI query workloads. In this paper, we propose an improvement that recommends Materialized Query Tables (MQTs) for backend servers for the benefits of load distribution and easy maintenance of aggregated data in conjunction with the current hybrid approach of data placement. Our approach considers the correlation between backend servers and recommends MQTs that are well coordinated among the backend servers and optimized for the workload. We also exploit the parallelism property among the backend servers to make our approach run almost linearly (in contrast to exponentially) with respect to the number of backend servers, without sacrificing its recommendation quality. Experimental evaluations validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.

Deriving Object Oriented Federated Databases and Processing Federated Queries

In this paper, we present a federated query processing approach to evaluate queries on an Object-Oriented (OO) federated database. This approach has been designed and implemented in the OO-Myriad project, which is an OO extension to the Myriad FDBS researchmyriad:94. Since data integration is performed as part of federated query processing, we have proposed outerjoin, outer-difference and generalized attribute derivation operations together with the traditional relational operations, to be used for integration purposes. To define an OO federated database as a virtual view on multiple OO export databases, we adopt a database mapping strategy that systematically derives each of the class extents, deep class extents and relationships of the federated database using an operator tree consisting of the integration operations. By augmenting federated database queries with this algebraic mapping information, query execution plans can be generated. Based on the original Myriad query processing framework, we have realized the proposed OO federated query processing approach in the OO-Myriad prototype.