ACM Digital Review

Review by H. V. Jagadish

Adaptive Execution of Variable-Accuracy Functions Positive rating
Matthew Denny and Michael Franklin

Accuracy of result is often traded for computation time in real-time systems, and in applications such as video streaming. In the database context, we have seen a similar trade off when using samples to estimate aggregate values over large data warehouses. This paper studies the application of this trade off to user-defined functions (UDFs). While this idea is simple, UDFs are not easily integrated into a query optimizer, or any other part of the query processing pipe, for that matter, so that the implementation of the idea requires some clever engineering. While the specifics of the engineering required for a different system may differ in the details, I think the major lessons do carry over. That the authors were able to pull it off at all is worth our respect.

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