Supporting Efficient Parametric Search of E-Commerce Data: A Loosely-Coupled Solution

  • Authors:
  • Min Wang;Yuan-Chi Chang;Sriram Padmanabhan

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-

  • Venue:
  • EDBT '02 Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Extending Database Technology: Advances in Database Technology
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

Electronic commerce is emerging as a major application area for database systems. A large number of e-commerce sites provide electronic product catalogs that allow users to search products of interest.Due to the constant evolution and the high sparsity of e-commerce data, most commercial e-commerce systems use the so-called vertical schema for data storage. However, query processing for data stored using vertical schema is extremely slow because current RDBMS, especially its cost-based query optimizer, is designed to deal with traditional horizontal schema efficiently.Most e-commerce systems would like to offer advanced parametric search capabilities to their users. However, most searches are expected to be on-line which means that the query execution should be very fast. RDBMSs require new capabilities and enhancements before they can satisfy the search performance criteria against vertical schema. The tightly-coupled enhancements and additions to a DBMS require considerable amount of work and may take a long time to be accomplished. In this paper, we describe an alternative approach called SAL, a Search Assistant Layer that can be implemented outside a database engine to accommodate the urgent need for efficient parametric search on e-commerce data. Our experimental results show that dramatic performance improvement is provided by SAL for search queries.