MonetDB Research Projects

The MonetDB scientific publications provide a rich account of our investigations into modern database kernels. Beside insights into the architectural choices, it contains a lot of information about specially targeted experiments to achieve good performance on query dominant applications, data mining in particular. The papers published by the CWI database research group can be browsed using the Digital Academic Repository of CWI and the reports on MonetDB can be selected using a query against this site.

Ongoing projects at CWI

The MonetDB software infrastructure remains at the core of ongoing projects at CWI. Either as on object of study, an experimentation platform, or as a means to tackle application challenges. A short description of the projects is given below:

• MonetDB/XQuery: a high-performance XML database system. It uses the Pathfinder XQuery-to-Relational Algebra compiler and (loop-lifted) staircase join algorithms to turn the binary relational MonetDB into a full-fledged XML DBMS.
• AmbientDB: a P2P database architecture, supporting ad-hoc distributed querying, schema integration and data synchronization. We see AmbientDB as a "data management" enhanced middleware technology, that eases construction of intelligent applications on networks of pervasive computing devices. The query processing core of AmbientDB is MonetDB/XQuery. It uses SOAP for distributed querying, and P2P data structures for node discovery and connectivity.
• X100: continues our research into the interaction between database architecture and modern computer architecture (cache-conscious processing, CPU efficiency of database algorithms, efficient exploitation sequential I/O). As this is about performance, we focus on the (few?) application domains where this is relevant. This includes on-line data mining and OLAP on large datawarehouses such as in TPC-H, but also content-based information access in huge multimedia databases like TREC Video.
• Cracking Database cracking is a technique that shifts the cost of index maintenance from updates to query processing. It is an area that challenges the software stack, i.e. using optimizers to massage the query plans to crack and to propagate this information to improved response times further.
• Skyserver The application domains call for advances in session-wide optimization and just-in-time optimization. The Sloane Digital SkyServer is one of the largest public scientific databases. Its master site is currently supported by SQL-server, but we expect to gain new insights and benefits from porting this application to the MonetDB platform.
• MonetDB Star Database replication and distributed query processing are a powerful scheme support scaleable database solutions. In this project we extend the code base with both 'old' technology and novel implementation techniques.