A Vision for Next Generation Query Processors and an Associated Research Agenda

• Authors: Anastasios Gounaris
• Venue: Globe '09 Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Data Management in Grid and Peer-to-Peer Systems
• Year: 2009

Query processing is one of the most important mechanisms for data management, and there exist mature techniques for effective query optimization and efficient query execution. The vast majority of these techniques assume workloads of rather small transactional tasks with strong requirements for ACID properties. However, the emergence of new computing paradigms, such as grid and cloud computing, the increasingly large volumes of data commonly processed, the need to support data driven research, intensive data analysis and new scenarios, such as processing data streams on the fly or querying web services, the fact that the metadata fed to optimizers are often missing at compile time, and the growing interest in novel optimization criteria, such as monetary cost or energy consumption, create a unique set of new requirements for query processing systems. These requirements cannot be met by modern techniques in their entirety, although interesting solutions and efficient tools have already been developed for some of them in isolation. Next generation query processors are expected to combine features addressing all of these issues, and, consequently, lie at the confluence of several research initiatives. This paper aims to present a vision for such processors, to explain their functionality requirements, and to discuss the open issues, along with their challenges.