Symbolic Query Processing

Speaker: Eric LO

Abstract

In software engineering, symbolic execution is a program verification technique, which represents values of program variables with symbolic values instead of concrete data and manipulates expressions based on those symbolic values. Symbolic query processing (SQP) is a novel technique that integrates the concept of symbolic execution into traditional query processing. In SQP, data are represented by symbols and a query evaluates symbolic data rather than concrete data. SQP can extend traditional program verification techniques and automatic test case generation systems to support database applications. In addition, SQP facilitates a wide range of database testing tasks such as testing of memory managers and testing the cardinality estimation components of query optimizers in a database management system. In this talk, we cover the concept of SQP, its applications, and present a test database generator that is based on SQP.