Grid-aware evaluation of regular path queries on large Spatial networks

• Main Author: Miao, Zhuo
• Other Authors: Thomo, Alex
• Language: English; en
• Published: 2007
• Subjects: Distributed; Query Evaluation; Regular Path Queries; Grid; Spatial databases; Road networks; UVic Subject Index::Sciences and Engineering::Applied Sciences::Computer science
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1828/192

Regular path queries (RPQs), expressed as regular expressions over the alphabet of database edge-labels, are commonly used for guided navigation of graph databases. RPQs are the basic building block of almost all the query languages for graph databases, providing the user with a nice and simple way to express recursion. While convenient to use, RPQs are notorious for their high computational demand. Except for few theoretical works, there has been little work evaluating RPQs on databases of great practical interest, such as large spatial networks. In this thesis, we present a grid-aware, fault tolerant distributed algorithm for answering RPQs on spatial networks. We engineer each part of the algorithm to account for the assumed computational-grid setting. We experimentally evaluate our algorithm, and show that for typical user queries, our algorithm satisfies the desiderata for distributed computing in general, and computational-grids in particular.