XXL - A Library Approach to Supporting Efficient Implementations of Advanced Database Queries

摘要

Today's DBMS are still too inflexible to adapt fast enough to the query processing needs of new applications [CW00]. Instead of using the cumbersome functionality of a monolithic DBMS, it is not uncommon that users implement their own functionality on top of the system. For such a scenario, the implementation would be substantially facilitated through a powerful library. This paper introduces XXL (extensible and fleX-ible Library), a high-level, easy-to-use, platform independent Java library supporting the implementation of new query functionality. XXL provides framework implementations as well as toolboxes whose applications are independent from the underlying data types and data structures. We introduce the most important concepts of XXL and discuss different application scenarios where XXL has been used recently. In particular, we show how an implementation of an efficient algorithm for processing spatial joins can easily be integrated into a commercial database system (Cloudscape).