Evaluating Answer Quality/Efficiency Tradeoffs.
Uğur Çetintemel, Björn Þór Jónsson, Michael J. M. Franklin, Clyde Lee Giles, Divesh Srivastava · 1998
For many emerging applications and environments, information systems designers and implementors must consider the tradeoffs between efficiency and the quality of query answers. This flexibility, while allowing numerous opportunities for optimization, complicates the development of various system components and their performance evaluation. In this short paper, we begin by outlining issues that arise in evaluating quality/efficiency tradeoffs. We then describe how we address some of these issues in two ongoing projects. 1 Introduction Traditionally, database systems have been designed based on the idea that for a given query on a given database, there is a single, correct answer that must be returned. It is clear, however, that for many emerging applications and environments it is neither practical nor desirable to enforce such a constraint. In particular, when scaling query processing to wide-area environments such as the World Wide Web, variable factors such as heterogeneity, availab...