Chapter 8: Complex Data Types

Database System Concepts, 7th Ed.

©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
See www.db-book.com for conditions on re-use
 Outline
 Semi-Structured Data
 Object Orientation
 Textual Data
 Spatial Data

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 8.2 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Semi-Structured Data
 Many applications require storage of complex data, whose schema
changes often
 The relational model’s requirement of atomic data types may be an
overkill
• E.g. storing set of interests as a set-valued attribute of a user profile may
be simpler than normalizing it
 Data exchange can benefit greatly from semi-structured data
• Exchange can be between applications, or between back-end and front-
end of an application
• Web-services are widely used today, with complex data fetched to the
front-end and displayed using a mobile app or JavaScript
 JSON and XML are widely used semi-structured data models

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 8.3 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Features of Semi-Structured Data Models
 Flexible schema
• Wide column representation: allow each tuple to have a different set of
attributes, can add new attributes at any time
• Sparse column representation: schema has a fixed but large set of
attributes, by each tuple may store only a subset
 Multivalued data types
• Sets, multisets
 E.g.: set of interests {‘basketball, ‘La Liga’, ‘cooking’, ‘anime’, ‘jazz’}
• Key-value map (or just map for short)
 Store a set of key-value pairs
 E.g. {(brand, Apple), (ID, MacBook Air), (size, 13), (color, silver)}
 Operations on maps: put(key, value), get(key), delete(key)
• , Arrays
 Widely used for scientific and monitoring applications

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 8.4 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Features of Semi-Structured Data Models
 Arrays
• Widely used for scientific and monitoring applications
• E.g. readings taken at regular intervals can be represented as array of
values instead of (time, value) pairs
 [5, 8, 9, 11] instead of {(1,5), (2, 8), (3, 9), (4, 11)}
 Multi-valued attribute types
• Modeled using non first-normal-form (NFNF) data model
• Supported by most database systems today
 Array database: a database that provides specialized support for
arrays
• E.g. compressed storage, query language extensions etc
• Oracle GeoRaster, PostGIS, SciDB, etc

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 8.5 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Nested Data Types
 Hierarchical data is common in many applications
 JSON: JavaScript Object Notation
• Widely used today
 XML: Extensible Markup Language
• Earlier generation notation, still used extensively

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 8.6 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 JSON
 Textual representation widely used for data exchange
 Example of JSON data
{
"ID": "22222",
"name": {
"firstname: "Albert",
"lastname: "Einstein"
},
"deptname": "Physics",
"children": [
{"firstname": "Hans", "lastname": "Einstein" },
{"firstname": "Eduard", "lastname": "Einstein" }
]
}
 Types: integer, real, string, and
• Objects: are key-value maps, i.e. sets of (attribute name, value) pairs
• Arrays are also key-value maps (from offset to value)

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 8.7 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 JSON
 JSON is ubiquitous in data exchange today
• Widely used for web services
• Most modern applications are architected around on web services
 SQL extensions for
• JSON types for storing JSON data
• Extracting data from JSON objects using path expressions
 E.g. V-> ID, or v.ID
• Generating JSON from relational data
 E.g. json.build_object(‘ID’, 12345, ‘name’, ‘Einstein’)
• Creation of JSON collections using aggregation
 E.g. json_agg aggregate function in PostgreSQL
• Syntax varies greatly across databases
 JSON is verbose
• Compressed representations such as BSON (Binary JSON) used for
efficient data storage
Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 8.8 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 XML
 XML uses tags to mark up text
 E.g.
<course>
<course id> CS-101 </course id>
<title> Intro. to Computer Science </title>
<dept name> Comp. Sci. </dept name>
<credits> 4 </credits>
</course>
 Tags make the data self-documenting
 Tags can be hierarchical

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 8.9 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Example of Data in XML
 <purchase order>
<identifier> P-101 </identifier>
<purchaser>
<name> Cray Z. Coyote </name>
<address> Route 66, Mesa Flats, Arizona 86047, USA
</address>
</purchaser>
<supplier>
<name> Acme Supplies </name>
<address> 1 Broadway, New York, NY, USA </address>
</supplier>
<itemlist>
<item>
<identifier> RS1 </identifier>
<description> Atom powered rocket sled </description>
<quantity> 2 </quantity>
<price> 199.95 </price>
</item>
<item>…</item>
</itemlist>
<total cost> 429.85 </total cost>
….
</purchase order>

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 8.10 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 XML Cont.
 XQuery language developed to query nested XML structures
• Not widely used currently
 SQL extensions to support XML
• Store XML data
• Generate XML data from relational data
• Extract data from XML data types
 Path expressions
 See Chapter 30 (online) for more information

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 8.11 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Knowledge Representation
 Representation of human knowledge is a long-standing goal of AI
• Various representations of facts and inference rules proposed over time
 RDF: Resource Description Format
• Simplified representation for facts, represented as triples
(subject, predicate, object)
 E.g. (NBA-2019, winner, Raptors)
(Washington-DC, capital-of, USA)
(Washington-DC, population, 6,200,000)
• Models objects that have attributes, and relationships with other objects
 Like the ER model, but with a flexible schema
 (ID, attribute-name, value)
 (ID1, relationship-name, ID2)
• Has a natural graph representation

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 8.12 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Graph View of RDF Data
 Knowledge graph

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 Triple View of RDF Data

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 8.14 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Querying RDF: SPARQL
 Triple patterns
• ?cid title "Intro. to Computer Science"
• ?cid title "Intro. to Computer Science"
?sid course ?cid
 SPARQL queries
• select ?name
where {
?cid title "Intro. to Computer Science" .
?sid course ?cid .
?id takes ?sid .
?id name ?name .
}
• Also supports
 Aggregation, Optional joins (similar to outerjoins), Subqueries, etc.
 Transitive closure on paths

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 8.15 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 RDF Representation (Cont.)
 RDF triples represent binary relationships
 How to represent n-ary relationships?
• Approach 1 (from Section 6.9.4): Create artificial entity, and link to each of
the n entities
 E.g. (Barack Obama, president-of, USA, 2008-2016) can be
represented as
(e1, person, Barack Obama), (e1, country, USA),
(e1, president-from, 2008) (e1, president-till, 2016)
• Approach 2: use quads instead of triples, with context entity
 E.g. (Barack Obama, president-of, USA, c1)
(c1, president-from, 2008) (c1, president-till, 2016)
 RDF widely used as knowledge base representation
• DBPedia, Yago, Freebase, WikiData, ..
 Linked open data project aims to connect different knowledge
graphs to allow queries to span databases

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 8.16 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Object Orientation
 Object-relational data model provides richer type system
• with complex data types and object orientation
 Applications are often written in object-oriented programming
languages
• Type system does not match relational type system
• Switching between imperative language and SQL is troublesome
 Approaches for integrating object-orientation with databases
• Build an object-relational database, adding object-oriented features to a
relational database
• Automatically convert data between programming language model and
relational model; data conversion specified by object-relational mapping
• Build an object-oriented database that natively supports object-oriented
data and direct access from programming language

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 8.17 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Object-Relational Database Systems
 User-defined types
• create type Person
(ID varchar(20) primary key,
name varchar(20),
address varchar(20)) ref from(ID); /* More on this later */
create table people of Person;
 Table types
• create type interest as table (
topic varchar(20),
degree_of_interest int);
create table users (
ID varchar(20),
name varchar(20),
interests interest);
 Array, multiset data types also supported by many databases
• Syntax varies by database

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 8.18 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Type and Table Inheritance
 Type inheritance
• create type Student under Person
(degree varchar(20)) ;
create type Teacher under Person
(salary integer);
 Table inheritance syntax in PostgreSQL and oracle
• create table students
(degree varchar(20))
inherits people;
create table teachers
(salary integer)
inherits people;
• create table people of Person;
create table students of Student
under people;
create table teachers of Teacher
under people;

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 8.19 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Reference Types
 Creating reference types
• create type Person
(ID varchar(20) primary key,
name varchar(20),
address varchar(20))
ref from(ID);
create table people of Person;
create type Department (
dept_name varchar(20),
head ref(Person) scope people);
create table departments of Department
insert into departments values ('CS', '12345’)
• System generated references can be retrieved using subqueries
 (select ref(p) from people as p where ID = '12345')
 Using references in path expressions
• select head->name, head->address
from departments;

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 8.20 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Object-Relational Mapping
 Object-relational mapping (ORM) systems allow
• Specification of mapping between programming language objects and
database tuples
• Automatic creation of database tuples upon creation of objects
• Automatic update/delete of database tuples when objects are
update/deleted
• Interface to retrieve objects satisfying specified conditions
 Tuples in database are queried, and object created from the tuples
 Details in Section 9.6.2
• Hibernate ORM for Java
• Django ORM for Python

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 8.21 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Textual Data
 Information retrieval: querying of unstructured data
• Simple model of keyword queries: given query keywords,retrieve
documents containing all the keywords
• More advanced models rank relevance of documents
• Today, keyword queries return many types of information as answers
 E.g. a query “cricket” typically returns information about ongoing
cricket matches
 Relevance ranking
• Essential since there are usually many documents matching keywords

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 8.22 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Ranking using TF-IDF
 Term: keyword occurring in a document/query
 Term Frequency: TF(d, t), the relevance of a term t to a document d
• One definition: TF(d, t) = log(1 + n(d,t)/n(d))
where n(d,t) = number of occurrences of term t in document d
and n(d) = number of terms in document d
 Inverse document frequency: IDF(t)
• One definition: IDF(t) = 1/n(t)
 Relevance of a document d to a set of terms Q
• One definition: r(d, Q) = ∑t∈Q TF(d, t) ∗ IDF(t)
• Other definitions
 take proximity of words into account
 Stop words are often ignored

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 8.23 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Ranking Using Hyperlinks
 Hyperlinks provide very important clues to importance
 Google introduced PageRank, a measure of popularity/importance
based on hyperlinks to pages
• Pages hyperlinked from many pages should have higher PageRank
• Pages hyperlinked from pages with higher PageRank should have higher
PageRank
• Formalized by random walk model
 Let T[i, j] be the probability that a random walker who is on page i will
click on the link to page j
• Assuming all links are equal, T[i, j] = 1∕Ni
 Then PageRank[j] for each page j can be defined as
• P[j] = δ∕N + (1 - δ) ∗ ∑i=1N (T[i, j] ∗ P[i])
• Where N = total number of pages, and δ a constant usually set to 0.15


Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 8.24 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Ranking Using Hyperlinks
 Definition of PageRank is circular, but can be solved as a set of linear
equations
• Simple iterative technique works well
• Initialize all P[i] = 1/N
• In each iteration use equation P[j] = δ∕N + (1 - δ) ∗ ∑i=1N (T[i, j] ∗ P[i]) to
update P
• Stop iteration when changes are small, or some limit (say 30 iterations) is
reached.
 Other measures of relevance are also important. For example:
• Keywords in anchor text
• Number of times who ask a query click on a link if it is returned as an
answer

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 8.25 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Retrieval Effectiveness
 Measures of effectiveness
• Precision: what percentage of returned results are actually relevant
• Recall: what percentage of relevant results were returned
• At some number of answers, e.g. precision@10, recall@10
 Keyword querying on structured data and knowledge bases
• Useful if users don’t know schema, or there is no predefined schema
• Can represent data as graphs
• Keywords match tuples
• Keyword search returns closely connected tuples that contain keywords
 E.g. on our university database given query “Zhang Katz”, Zhang
matches a student, Katz an instructor and advisor relationship links
them

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 8.26 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 SPATIAL DATA

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 8.27 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Spatial Data
 Spatial databases store information related to spatial locations, and
support efficient storage, indexing and querying of spatial data.
• Geographic data -- road maps, land-usage maps, topographic
elevation maps, political maps showing boundaries, land-
ownership maps, and so on.
 Geographic information systems are special-purpose
databases tailored for storing geographic data.
 Round-earth coordinate system may be used
• (Latitude, longitude, elevation)
• Geometric data: design information about how objects are
constructed . For example, designs of buildings, aircraft, layouts of
integrated-circuits.
 2 or 3 dimensional Euclidean space with (X, Y, Z) coordinates

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 8.28 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Represented of Geometric Information
Various geometric constructs can be represented in a database in
a normalized fashion (see next slide)

 A line segment can be represented by the coordinates of its endpoints.

 A polyline or linestring consists of a connected sequence of line
segments and can be represented by a list containing the coordinates of
the endpoints of the segments, in sequence.
• Approximate a curve by partitioning it into a sequence of segments
 Useful for two-dimensional features such as roads.
 Some systems also support circular arcs as primitives, allowing
curves to be represented as sequences of arc
 Polygons is represented by a list of vertices in order.
• The list of vertices specifies the boundary of a polygonal region.
• Can also be represented as a set of triangles (triangulation)

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 8.29 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Representation of Geometric Constructs

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 8.30 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Representation of Geometric Information
(Cont.)

 Representation of points and line segment in 3-D similar to 2-D,

except that points have an extra z component
 Represent arbitrary polyhedra by dividing them into tetrahedrons, like
triangulating polygons.
 Alternative: List their faces, each of which is a polygon, along with an
indication of which side of the face is inside the polyhedron.
 Geometry and geography data types supported by many databases
• E.g. SQL Server and PostGIS
• point, linestring, curve, polygons
• Collections: multipoint, multilinestring, multicurve, multipolygon
• LINESTRING(1 1, 2 3, 4 4)
• POLYGON((1 1, 2 3, 4 4, 1 1))
• Type conversions: ST GeometryFromText() and ST
GeographyFromText()
• Operations: ST Union(), ST Intersection(), …
Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 8.31 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Design Databases
 Represent design components as objects (generally geometric
objects); the connections between the objects indicate how the design
is structured.
 Simple two-dimensional objects: points, lines, triangles, rectangles,
polygons.
 Complex two-dimensional objects: formed from simple objects via
union, intersection, and difference operations.
 Complex three-dimensional objects: formed from simpler objects such
as spheres, cylinders, and cuboids, by union, intersection, and
difference operations.
 Wireframe models represent three-dimensional surfaces as a set of
simpler objects.

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 8.32 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Representation of Geometric Constructs
 Design databases also store non-spatial information about objects (e.g.,
construction material, color, etc.)
 Spatial integrity constraints are important.
• E.g., pipes should not intersect, wires should not be too close to each
other, etc.

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 8.33 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Geographic Data
 Raster data consist of bit maps or pixel maps, in two or more
dimensions.
• Example 2-D raster image: satellite image of cloud cover, where
each pixel stores the cloud visibility in a particular area.
• Additional dimensions might include the temperature at different
altitudes at different regions, or measurements taken at different
points in time.
 Design databases generally do not store raster data.

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 8.34 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Geographic Data (Cont.)
 Vector data are constructed from basic geometric objects: points,
line segments, triangles, and other polygons in two dimensions, and
cylinders, spheres, cuboids, and other polyhedrons in three
dimensions.
 Vector format often used to represent map data.
• Roads can be considered as two-dimensional and represented by
lines and curves.
• Some features, such as rivers, may be represented either as
complex curves or as complex polygons, depending on whether
their width is relevant.
• Features such as regions and lakes can be depicted as polygons.

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 8.35 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Spatial Queries
 Region queries deal with spatial regions. e.g., ask for objects that lie
partially or fully inside a specified region
• E.g. PostGIS ST_Contains(), ST_Overlaps(), …
 Nearness queries request objects that lie near a specified location.
 Nearest neighbor queries, given a point or an object, find the
nearest object that satisfies given conditions.
 Spatial graph queries request information based on spatial graphs
• E.g. shortest path between two points via a road network
 Spatial join of two spatial relations with the location playing the role
of join attribute.
 Queries that compute intersections or unions of regions

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 8.36 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
End of Chapter 8