An Abstract Semantics and Concrete Language for Continuous Queries over Streams and Relations

Despite the recent surge of research in query processing over data streams, little attention has been devoted to defining precise semantics for continuous queries over streams. We first present an abstract semantics based on several building blocks: formal definitions for streams and relations, mappings among them, and any relational query language. From these basics we define a precise interpretation for continuous queries over streams and relations. We then propose a concrete language, CQL (for Continuous Query Language), which instantiates the abstract semantics using SQL as the relational query language and window specifications derived from SQL-99 to map from streams to relations. We identify some equivalences that can be used to rewrite CQL queries for optimization, and we discuss some additional implementation issues arising from the language and its semantics. We have implemented a substantial fraction of CQL in a Data Stream Management System at Stanford, and we have developed a public repository of data stream applications that includes a wide variety of queries expressed in CQL.