Felix Naumann

Daniel Lindner, Daniel Ritter, Felix Naumann

Primary key (PK) and foreign key (FK) constraints are widely used for query optimization. Knowledge about additional data dependencies, such as order dependencies, enables further substantial performance improvements. However, such dependencies are not maintained by database systems or are even unknown to the user. Identifying and validating relevant dependencies automatically and efficiently remains an unsolved problem. This paper presents a system that (i) recognizes dependency candidates for optimization, (ii) efficiently validates their applicability, and (iii) optimizes query plans using valid dependencies. First, we demonstrate the performance impact of optimization techniques using data dependencies additional to PKs and FKs. Using rewritten SQL queries, we empirically show that data dependencies improve performance for a wide range of analytical database systems and benchmarks. Second, we present how to integrate data dependencies into a system to use them without (i) manual declaration and maintenance or (ii) SQL rewrites. Our integrated and fully automated system matches the performance of dedicated SQL rewrites: compared to using only PKs and FKs, queries improve with geometric mean speedups of 35 % for TPC-DS and 29 % for JOB. Individual query latencies drop by more than 90 %. The dependency discovery overhead is orders of magnitude lower than the latency improvement of a single workload execution.

Pınar Tözün, Felix Naumann, Philippe Bonnet et al.

In 2020, while main database conferences one by one had to adopt a virtual format as a result of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, we decided to hold VLDB 2021 in hybrid format. This paper describes how we defined the hybrid format for VLDB 2021 going through the key design decisions. In addition, we list the lessons learned from running such a conference. Our goal is to share this knowledge with fellow conference organizers who target a hybrid conference format as well, which is on its way to becoming the norm rather than the exception. For readers who are more interested in the highlights rather than details, a short version of this report appears in SIGMOD Record.

Gerardo Vitagliano, Lan Jiang, Felix Naumann

Spreadsheets are among the most commonly used file formats for data management, distribution, and analysis. Their widespread employment makes it easy to gather large collections of data, but their flexible canvas-based structure makes automated analysis difficult without heavy preparation. One of the common problems that practitioners face is the presence of multiple, independent regions in a single spreadsheet, possibly separated by repeated empty cells. We define such files as "multiregion" files. In collections of various spreadsheets, we can observe that some share the same layout. We present the Mondrian approach to automatically identify layout templates across multiple files and systematically extract the corresponding regions. Our approach is composed of three phases: first, each file is rendered as an image and inspected for elements that could form regions; then, using a clustering algorithm, the identified elements are grouped to form regions; finally, every file layout is represented as a graph and compared with others to find layout templates. We compare our method to state-of-the-art table recognition algorithms on two corpora of real-world enterprise spreadsheets. Our approach shows the best performances in detecting reliable region boundaries within each file and can correctly identify recurring layouts across files.

Toni Gruetze, Gjergji Kasneci, Zhe Zuo et al.

Some of the main ranking features of today's search engines reflect result popularity and are based on ranking models, such as PageRank, implicit feedback aggregation, and more. While such features yield satisfactory results for a wide range of queries, they aggravate the problem of search for ambiguous entities: Searching for a person yields satisfactory results only if the person we are looking for is represented by a high-ranked Web page and all required information are contained in this page. Otherwise, the user has to either reformulate/refine the query or manually inspect low-ranked results to find the person in question. A possible approach to solve this problem is to cluster the results, so that each cluster represents one of the persons occurring in the answer set. However clustering search results has proven to be a difficult endeavor by itself, where the clusters are typically of moderate quality. A wealth of useful information about persons occurs in Web 2.0 platforms, such as LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Facebook, etc. Being human-generated, the information on these platforms is clean, focused, and already disambiguated. We show that when searching for ambiguous person names the information from such platforms can be bootstrapped to group the results according to the individuals occurring in them. We have evaluated our methods on a hand-labeled dataset of around 5,000 Web pages retrieved from Google queries on 50 ambiguous person names.