Advanced Query Processing: An Introduction

Traditional query processing techniques have played a major role in the success of relational Database Management Systems over the last decade. However, they do not obviously extend to much more challenging, unorganized and unpredictable data providers, typical of emerging data intensive applications and novel processing environments. For them, advanced query processing and data integration approaches have been proposed with the aim of still guaranteeing an effective and efficient data access in such more complex data management scenarios. The aim of this chapter is to present the main issues and trends arising in advanced query processing and to relate them to the various parts of this book. For each part, a brief description of the background concepts and of the presented contributions is also provided.