ACM SIGMOD/PODS 2005 Conference

Baltimore, Maryland

June 13-16,2005 

PODS Invited Talk and Tutorials

Invited Talk

Phokion G. Kolaitis
IBM Almaden Research Center and UC Santa Cruz

Schema Mappings, Data Exchange, and Metadata Management

Schema mappings are high-level specifications that describe the relationship between database schemas. Schema mappings are prominent in several different areas of database management, including database design, information integration, data exchange, metadata management, and peer-to-peer data management systems. Our main aim in this talk is to present an overview of recent advances in data exchange and metadata management, where the schema mappings are between relational schemas. In addition, we highlight some research issues and directions for future work.

Tutorials

Johannes Gehrke
Cornell University

Models and Methods for Privacy-Preserving Data Publishing and Analysis

The digitization of our daily lives has led to an explosion in the collection of data by governments, corporations, and individuals. Protection of confidentiality of this data is of utmost importance. However, knowledge of statistical properties of this private data can have significant societal benefit, for example, in decisions about the allocation of public funds based on Census data, or in the analysis of medical data from different hospitals to understand the interaction of drugs. This tutorial will survey recent research that builds bridges between the two seemingly conflicting goals of sharing data while preserving data privacy and confidentiality. The tutorial will cover definitions of privacy and disclosure, and associated methods how to enforce them.

Monica Lam
Stanford University

Analyzing Programs with Database Queries

Today's software is ridden with errors that can lead to catastrophic failures and vulnerabilities that compromise system integrity. Program analysis has been shown to be effective in locating serious bugs in large applications. For this approach to have a major impact, we need to make it easy for individual developers, not just compiler experts, to use the same techniques to find error patterns specific to their own programs. We have developed a language called PQL (Program Query Language) that accepts error patterns expressed in an intuitive manner and generates sophisticated checkers for them automatically. PQL has been used to find critical security vulnerabilities in Java applications.

This talk focuses on how deductive database technology is used in PQL to hide and manage massive amounts of information behind a high-level programmatic abstraction. PQL queries are first translated into Datalog queries, which are then sent to our Bddbddb (BDD-Based Deductive DataBase) system. Relations are represented as BDDs (binary decision diagrams) so as to capture information on the exponentially many calling contexts in a program efficiently. Bddbddb takes succinct Datalog queries and translates them into highly optimized BDD operations.