CAREER: New Technologies for Online Aggregation

University Of Florida, Gainesville FL

Investigators

Abstract

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.