The goal of the CONTROL project at Berkeley is to develop systems for interactive analysis of large data sets. We focus on systems that provide users with iteratively refining answers to requests and online control of processing, thereby tightening the loop in the data analysis process. This paper presents the database-centric subproject of CONTROL: a complete online query processing facility, implemented in a commercial ObjectRelational DBMS from Informix. We describe the algorithms at the core of the system, and detail the end-to-end issues required to bring the algorithms together and deliver a complete system.
Joseph M. Hellerstein, Ron Avnur, Vijayshankar Ram