OBJECT-RELATIONAL QUERIES INTO MULTIDIMENSIONAL DATABASES WITH THE ACTIVE DATA REPOSITORY

Abstract

As computational power and storage capacity increase, processing and analyzing large volumes of multi-dimensional datasets play an increasingly important role in many domains of scientific research. Scientific applications that make use of very large scientific datasets have several important characteristics: datasets consist of complex data and are usually multi-dimensional; applications usually retrieve a subset of all the data available in the dataset; various application-specific operations are performed on the data items retrieved. Such applications can be supported by object-relational database management systems (OR-DBMSs). In addition to providing functionality to define new complex datatypes and user-defined functions, an OR-DBMS for scientific datasets should contain runtime support that will provide optimized storage for very large datasets and an execution environment for user-defined functions involving expensive operations. In this paper we describe an infrastructure, the Active Data Repository (ADR), which provides framework for building databases that enables integration of storage, retrieval and processing of multi-dimensional datasets on a parallel machine. The system architecture of ADR provides the functionality required from runtime support for an OR-DBMS that stores and processes scientific multi-dimensional datasets. We present the system architecture of the ADR, and experimental performance results for three applications implemented using ADR.