Meta-Querying in Databases: A Practical Approach

Title: Meta-Querying in Databases: A Practical Approach

Research Question: How can we enable users to perform meta-querying, or querying about queries, in a practical and efficient manner within a database system?

Methodology: The researchers proposed a system that represents stored queries in XML format and uses the standard XML manipulation language XSLT as a sublanguage. They added a few features to SQL to make it a fully-fledged meta-query language. These features include XML variables that range over the subelements of an XML tree, and XML aggregation, which allows going from a set of XML documents to a single one.

Results: The researchers demonstrated that their approach allows for both syntactical and semantical meta-querying. They showed that many syntactical meta-queries can be expressed directly in SQL by allowing XSLT function calls within SQL expressions. For more complex syntactical meta-queries, they added XML variables and aggregation to SQL.

Implications: This research has significant implications for the database community. It suggests a practical way to enable meta-querying in databases, which can be beneficial for tasks such as advanced data-base administration, database usage monitoring, and workload analysis. It also aligns with the goal of unifying programs and data in database systems, as proposed by Jim Gray.

Link to Article: https://arxiv.org/abs/0202037v2 Authors: arXiv ID: 0202037v2