This award supports Leonard Shapiro and one or two graduate students from Portland State University in a collaboration with Bernhard Mitschang of the department of Information Science at the Technical University in Munich, Germany. The research funded by this award will focus on optimization of queries to large data warehouses and against complex multimedia objects. Current optimizers have proved inadequate to the needs of new application areas. Indispensable to progress in this area are parallel data base management systems (DBMSs) to handle large data sets and object DBMSs to offer the necessary semantic capabilities. The U.S. group possesses significant expertise in object DBMSs and the German group has designed a next-generation parallel DBMS. Working together, the two groups will be able to understand how object and parallel DBMSs can be integrated into a single optimizer for improved performance of queries. This type of advancement is crucial to knowledge management in a time when the amount of data to be processed and handled is increasing at an exponential rate.
