Project R-8548

Navigational Queries over Graph-Structured Data (Research)

In recent years, database systems have seen a profound shift to highly specialized NoSQL databases. Compared to the maturity of SQL, query languages for NoSQL databases, like graph-databases, are still in their infancy. In my thesis, I want to investigate the underlying principles of graph-structured data, notably evaluation, query optimization, and parallelizability of graph query languages and bring the principled research on these topics closer to practice. Motivated by the recent trend to distributed- and cloud computing, one of the key questions will be the search for queries that are highly suited for parallel evaluation and optimization in a distributed context. Furthermore, I want to study which kinds of queries are practically used and search for restricted query languages that have good computational properties. In other words, I want to look for query languages that can still express what most users want, but for which much faster algorithms are possible.

01 January 2018 - 30 June 2021