Toward a Progress Indicator for Database Queries

Many modern software systems provide progress indicators for long-running tasks. These progress indicators make systems more user-friendly by helping the user quickly estimate how much of the task has been completed and when the task will finish. However, none of the existing commercial RDBMSs provides a non-trivial progress indicator for long-running queries. In this paper, we consider the problem of supporting such progress indicators. After discussing the goals and challenges inherent in this problem, we present a set of techniques sufficient for implementing a simple yet useful progress indicator for a large subset of RDBMS queries. We report an initial implementation of these techniques in PostgreSQL.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: SIGMOD
• Authors: Gang Luo, Jeffrey F. Naughton, Curt J. Ellmann, Michael Watzke
• Keywords: Database, Non-trivial Progress Indicator, Progress Indicators, SIGMOD 2004, Useful Progress Indicator