Access paths in the "Abe" statistical query facility
Anthony C. Klug · 1982
An increasingly important part of information processing today involves the taking of counts, sums, averages, and other statistical or aggregate quantities. The "Abe" query language is designed to make formulation of complicated aggregations simple. Access path selection in Abe finds efficient ways to execute these complicated queries. Access paths for Abe queries perform "aggregate joins", that is, they compute aggregate quantities at the same time as they join subqueries with parent queries. This can be done using index scans or merging scans depending on how many "partitions" need to be accessed.