Query sampling in DB2 Universal Database

摘要

Executing ad hoc queries against large databases can be prohibitively expensive. Exploratory analysis of data may not require exact answers to queries, however: results based on sampling the data are often satisfactory. Supporting sampling as a primitive SQL operator turns out to be difficult because sampling does not commute with many SQL operators.In this paper, we describe an implementation in IBM® DB2® Universal Database (UDB) of a sampling operator that commutes with some SQL operators. As a result, the query with the sampling operator always returns a random sample of the answers and in many cases runs faster than it would have without such an operator.