ACM SIGMOD-papers of interest #2 with demo URLs

Continuing my previous post, here are a few short reviews, some continaining betas/demo URLs.

"PREFER: A System for the Efficient Execution of Multiparametric Ranked
Queries"
V. Hristidis, N. Koudas, Y. Papakonstantinou

This paper deals with the best way to return a result set quickly for weighted queries. The example given describes a house purchase. If the most important factor in my purchase is price (weighted 50%), but I also care about location, age of the house, ... a normal SQL query would need to read the entire table(s), and apply a weighted function to each row before being able to return a result set. Most of the time the query is just ordered by a single attribute. This paper claims that using materialized views improve performance dramatically. A demo and beta(?) version of the application are available at www.db.ucsd.edu/PREFER

I had trouble getting the application to work. (I ran it against an 8.1.6 database, not the recommended 8.1.7. I'd be interested if anyone else had luck with this.)

"COSIMA - Your Smart, Speaking E-Salesperson"
W. Kiessling, S. Holland, S. Fischer, T. Ehm

This is a new user interface for e-shopping that advises customers like a real salesperson (hope they never visited Durgin Park). COSIMA can present the best match and present it using proper voice output. The software can be downloaded from www.myCOSIMA.com

"Online Query Processing: A Tutorial"

P. Haas, J. Hellerstein

The authors discuss the ability to compute online aggregation queries. Instead of waiting for the calculation to complete, their goal is to provide incremental results via estimations of the final result, along with the statistical confidence values. See http://control.cs.berkeley.edu

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