Abstract
Efficient retrieval of the most relevant (i.e. top-k) tuples is an important requirement in information management systems which access large amounts of data. In general answering a top-k query request means to retrieve the k objects which score best for an objective function. We propose some improvements to the best position algorithm (BPA-2) [2]. To the best of our knowledge BPA-2 is currently the fastest available top-k query answering approach based on the widely known and applied Threshold Algorithm (short TA) of Fagin et al. [5]. Our proposed improvements lead to significantly reduced time and memory consumption and better scalability compared to BPA-2: (1) we dynamically create value rather than object based index structures out of the query restrictions posed by the user, (2) we introduce look-ahead techniques to process those index structures. While BPA-2 processes all pre-calculated indexes in parallel we always examine the most promising indexing structure next. We prototypically implemented our fast top-k query answering (FTA) approach. Our experiments showed an improvement by one to two orders of magnitude over BPA-2.
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Dabringer, C., Eder, J. (2011). Fast Top-K Query Answering. In: Hameurlain, A., Liddle, S.W., Schewe, KD., Zhou, X. (eds) Database and Expert Systems Applications. DEXA 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6861. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23091-2_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23091-2_14
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