Database Theory in Action: Direct Access to Query Answers

TL;DR

This paper explores the practical implementation and performance of direct access query retrieval methods in databases, comparing various systems and analyzing their efficiency in real-world scenarios.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive implementation for direct access queries supporting multiple orders, bridging the gap between theoretical complexity and practical performance.

Findings

Practical performance varies significantly across database systems.

Direct access methods can outperform traditional single-access approaches in specific contexts.

The implementation reveals insights into the relationship between direct and single-access query efficiencies.

Abstract

Direct access asks for the retrieval of query answers by their ranked position, given a query and a desired order. While the time complexity of data structures supporting such accesses has been studied in depth, and efficient algorithms for many queries and common orders are known, their practical performance has received little attention. We provide an implementation covering a wide range of queries and orders; it allows us to investigate intriguing practical aspects, including the comparative performance of database systems and the relationship between direct access and its single-access counterpart.