Aqua Project White Paper

In large data recording and warehousing environments it is often advantageous to provide fast approximate answers to queries whenever possible The goal is to provide an estimated response in orders of magnitude less time than the time to compute an exact answer by avoiding or minimizing the number of accesses to the base data This white paper describes the Approximate QUery Answering AQUA Project underway in the Information Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs We present a framework for an approximate query engine that observes new data as it arrives and maintains small synopsis data structures on that data These data structures are used to provide fast approximate answers to a broad class of queries We describe metrics for evaluating approximate query answers We also present new synopsis data structures and new techniques for approximate query answers We report on the goals and status of the Aqua project and plans for future work Email gibbons research bell labs com Current address is Tel Aviv University Ramat Aviv Tel Aviv Israel Email matias math tau ac il Email poosala research bell labs com