Know Your Queries! (KYQ)
Internally funded project
Acronym: KYQ
Start date : 01.04.2015
End date : 31.12.2018
Project details
Short description
"You should know your queries!" is the long version of the project title. It means that you should not just want tho have a database, but you should also think about the evaluations (which are written down as queries) that you actually would like to do with that database. The creation of a database is quite an effort, regarding not only the deployment of the software on a computer, but even more the capture of all the data to fill it. This effort should be spent with a goal in mind. The project will therefore collect queries, which can then even be used to automatically design a database. This saves resources on one hand, but on the other also supports the privacy goal of data minimization.
Scientific Abstract
The project aims at the management of database queries for a number of different purposes. A simple form is the use for the optimization of a given database instance. This is done by database administrators anyway, and often the database systems helps them in storing the queries and making suggestions for optimizations.
If you know your queries, however, you can do much more. You can check whether some of them would be executed more efficiently by a datastream system. Or by a NoSQL system. In both cases the queries must be translated into the languages understood by the resp. system.
And finally one can take queries also when the system needed to execute them does not even exist. One reason can be that the data needed to respond to the query are locally stored in your own system, but are available in external sources that still need to be attached. Another reason can be that there is no database system yet. Designing it could benefit substantially from knowing the queries that it is to execute later on. One can even try to generate parts of the database schema automatically from the queries.
