Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

Relational database systems have been, and in many ways continue to be, the main driving engine behind the data revolution. The hallmarks of these systems that enabled the revolution are relative efficiency, powerful, elegant, declarative query languages, and transactional consistency. Codd's Principle of Data Independence provided for a layer of abstraction that has allowed applications and users to deal with the data at a logical level, without need to know how the database system deals with the data at the physical level. Data independence allows for the database engine to ensure transactional consistency; this removes the need for application programs to do so. This bargain has made writing a wide range of large data applications significantly easier. But this bargain does come with costs too, of course. One is limited to what the ""query-language"" interfaces, such as SQL and Xquery, provide. While SQL has evolved into a quite competent platform for relational data management and for complex analytic queries backing business applications, it is, with no small irony, poorly suited for data exploration and visualization tasks. Meanwhile, exploration and visualization of large data collections has become just as important a need today as has been traditional data management in the past. We plan to provide a scale-free, progressive, direct visualization of aggregate data for types of SQL queries towards supporting data exploration.