Fast Evaluation of Join and Aggregate Conditions in Active Databases

Abstract

Complex rule conditions are commonly required to describe complicated business semantics. In these cases, efficient condition evaluation is crucial for high performance of active database systems. Most previous works used the incremental evaluation techniques, whose operations are relatively expensive due to the processing based on the exact calculation of the condition expression. In this paper we propose a new filtering technique that effectively identifies false condition in an early stage of condition monitoring. Since the results of condition evaluation tend to be false in most practical cases, an efficient filtering method can highly facilitate fast condition evaluation. The proposed filtering technique is developed based on the new perspective of database state and database operations, i.e., a vector space model. We first present vector representations of database states, database operations, and complex condition expressions. Then, we propose a filtering method based on the properties of a vector space, called the sphere containment test. Our proposed method determines the truth value of the rule conditions only with the delta vectors maintained in main memory. We compare our method with a typical incremental evaluation method and show that the proposed method can give a significant performance enhancement.