Juggling Functions Inside a Database
Mahmoud Abo Khamis, Hung Q. Ngo, Atri Rudra

TL;DR
The paper introduces the FAQ problem and the InsideOut algorithm, a unified, worst-case optimal approach for evaluating complex functions across diverse domains like databases, graphical models, and tensor computations.
Contribution
It presents a new declarative framework and a simple, efficient algorithm that unifies and optimizes the evaluation of a wide range of computational tasks.
Findings
InsideOut achieves worst-case optimal runtime for FAQ evaluations.
The framework unifies diverse applications such as databases, graphical models, and tensor computations.
InsideOut is implemented in the LogicBlox database engine, improving query efficiency.
Abstract
We define and study the Functional Aggregate Query (FAQ) problem, which captures common computational tasks across a very wide range of domains including relational databases, logic, matrix and tensor computation, probabilistic graphical models, constraint satisfaction, and signal processing. Simply put, an FAQ is a declarative way of defining a new function from a database of input functions. We present "InsideOut", a dynamic programming algorithm, to evaluate an FAQ. The algorithm rewrites the input query into a set of easier-to-compute FAQ sub-queries. Each sub-query is then evaluated using a worst-case optimal relational join algorithm. The topic of designing algorithms to optimally evaluate the classic multiway join problem has seen exciting developments in the past few years. Our framework tightly connects these new ideas in database theory with a vast number of application…
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Taxonomy
TopicsData Management and Algorithms · Advanced Database Systems and Queries · Bayesian Modeling and Causal Inference
