PREFER: A System for the Efficient Execution of Multi-parametric Ranked Queries

Users often need to optimize the selection of objects by appropriately weighting the importance of multiple object attributes. Such optimization problems appear often in operations' research and applied mathematics as well as everyday life; e.g., a buyer may select a home as a weighted function of a number of attributes like its distance from office, its price, its area, etc. We capture such queries in our definition of preference queries that use a weight function over a relation's attributes to derive a score for each tuple. Database systems cannot efficiently produce the top results of a preference query because they need to evaluate the weight function over all tuples of the relation. PREFER answers preference queries efficiently by using materialized views that have been preprocessed and stored. We first show how the result of a preference query can be produced in a pipelined fashion using a materialized view. Then we show that excellent performance can be delivered giv...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2001
• Where: SIGMOD
• Authors: Vagelis Hristidis, Nick Koudas, Yannis Papakonstantinou
• Keywords: Answers Preference Queries, Database, Multiple Object Attributes, Preference Query, SIGMOD 2001