CAREER: New Technologies for Online Aggregation

该项目致力于研究一种有前景的交互式大规模数据分析方法，称为在线聚合(OLA)。在OLA中，用户始终被告知对数据的查询的当前估计，以及对答案的准确性的统计估计。OLA的优点是，通常可以非常快速且廉价地计算出具有令人满意的精度的近似答案，此时可以终止查询。该项目有两个目标--技术和教育。该项目的技术目标是设计和实施一个基本上基于OLA的数据分析软件系统，而不是用一些OLA功能来增强传统的批处理体系结构的软件。该项目重新考虑了数据管理问题，如索引、查询优化、连接算法，以及在OLA环境下的用户界面设计。评估是通过对所生产的软件进行严格的基准测试进行的。该项目的教育目标是开发技术，利用教师的直接参与来帮助确保留住初学工程学的学生。该项目将通过开发有潜力的技术来产生广泛的影响，使目前致力于分析处理的35亿美元的软件行业部分发生根本变化。此外，通过研究如何确保未来工程师的留住和成功，该项目将产生广泛的影响，帮助确保国家的技术和科学领导地位。项目网站http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~cjermain/OLA将用于传播成果。

The project is concerned with investigating a promising approach to interactive, large-scale data analysis, called online aggregation (OLA). In OLA, the user is kept informed at all times of the current estimate of the answer to a query over the data, along with a statistical estimate of the accuracy of the answer. The advantage of OLA is that an approximate answer with satisfactory accuracy can often be computed very quickly and inexpensively, at which time the query can be terminated. The project has two goals - technological and educational. The technological goal of the project is designing and implementing a software system for data analysis that is fundamentally based on OLA, as opposed to software that augments the traditional, batched processing architecture with some OLA capabilities. The project reconsiders data management issues such as indexing, query optimization, join algorithms, and user interface design in the context of OLA. Evaluation is via rigorous benchmarking of the software produced. The educational goal of the project is development of techniques the make use of direct faculty involvement to help ensure retention of beginning engineering students. The project will achieve broad impact by developing techniques with potential to bring about a fundamental change in the $3.5 billion segment of the software industry now devoted to analytic processing. Also, by investigating ways to ensure the retention and success of tomorrow's engineers, the project will achieve broad impact by helping to ensure the technological and scientific leadership of the nation. The project Web site http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~cjermain/OLA will be used for the results dissemination.