Querying Heterogeneous Data in an In-situ Unified Agile System (original) (raw)

Data integration provides a unified view of data by combining different data sources. In today’s multi-disciplinary and collaborative research environments, data is often produced and consumed by various means, multiple researchers operate on the data in different divisions to satisfy various research requirements, and using different query processors and analysis tools. This makes data integration a crucial component of any successful data intensive research activity. The fundamental difficulty is that data is heterogeneous not only in syntax, structure, and semantics, but also in the way it is accessed and queried. We introduce QUIS (QUery In-Situ), an agile query system equipped with a unified query language and a federated execution engine. It is capable of running queries on heterogeneous data sources in an in-situ manner. Its language provides advanced features such as virtual schemas, heterogeneous joins, and polymorphic result set representation. QUIS utilizes a federation o...