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Is Query Optimization a "solved" problem? If not, are we attacking the "right" problems? How should we identify the "right" problems to solve?
I asked these same questions almost exactly 25 years ago, in an extended abstract for a Workshop on Database Query Optimization that was organized by the then-Professor Goetz Graefe at the Oregon Graduate Center [Grae 89a]. Remarkably and quite regrettably, most of the issues and critical unsolved problems I identified in that brief rant remain true today. Researchers continue to attack the wrong problems, IMHO: they attack the ones that they can, i.e., that they have ideas for, rather than the ones that they should, i.e., that are critical to successfully modeling the true cost of plans and choosing a good one. Perhaps more importantly, that will avoid choosing a disastrous plan! At the risk of repeating myself, I'd like to re-visit these issues, because I'm disappointed that few in the research community have taken up my earlier challenge.
The root of all evil, the Achilles Heel of query optimization, is the estimation of the size of intermediate results, known as cardinalities. Everything in cost estimation depends upon how many rows will be processed, so the entire cost model is predicated upon the cardinality model. In my experience, the cost model may introduce errors of at most 30% for a given cardinality, but the cardinality model can quite easily introduce errors of many orders of magnitude! I'll give a real-world example in a moment. With such errors, the wonder isn't "Why did the optimizer pick a bad plan?" Rather, the wonder is "Why would the optimizer ever pick a decent plan?"
"Well," you say, "we've seen lots of improvements in histograms, wavelets, and other statistics since 1989. Surely we do better now." There's been no shortage of such papers, it's true, but the wealth of such papers precisely illustrates my point. Developing new histograms that improve selectivity estimation for individual local predicates of the form "Age BETWEEN 47 AND 63" by a few percent doesn't really matter, when other, much larger errors that are introduced elsewhere in cardinality estimation dwarf those minor improvements. It's simple engineering, folks. If I have to review one more such paper on improved histograms for local predicates, I'll scream (and reject it)! It just doesn't matter! What we have now is good enough.
What still introduces the most error in cardinality estimation is (a) host variables and parameter markers, (b) the selectivity of join predicates, and, even more significantly, (c) how we combine selectivities to estimate the cardinality. Amazingly, these three topics also have enjoyed the least research attention, or at least the fewest number of papers attempting to solve them, unless I've missed some major contributions lately. I'll visit each of these topics in turn, describing the fundamental causes of errors, and why those errors can easily reach disastrous proportions, illustrated by war stories from real customer situations.
Host variables and parameter markers
One of our major ISVs retrofitted a table with a field that identified which subsystem each row came from. It had 6 distinct values, but 99.99% of the rows had the value of the founding subsystem, i.e., when there was only one. A predicate on this subsystem column was added to every query, with the value being passed as a host variable. Not knowing that value a priori, DB2's optimizer used the average value of 1/|distinct values| = 0.167, though that predicate's true selectivity was usually 0.9999 (not selective at all) and once in a blue moon was 0.0001 (extremely selective).
There has been some work on this so-called Parametric Query Optimization (PQO), though it's sometimes attacking the problem of other parameters unknown at compilation time (e.g. the number of buffer pages available) or limited to discrete values [Ioan 97]. One of my favorites is a fascinating empirical study by Reddy and Haritsa [Redd 05] of plan spaces for several commercial query optimizers as the selectivity of multiple local predicates are varied. It demonstrated (quite colorfully!) that regions in which a particular plan is optimal may not be convex and may even be disconnected! Graefe suggested keeping a different plan for each possible value of each host variable [Grae 89b], but with multiple host variables and a large number of possible values, Graefe's scheme quickly gets impractical to optimize, store, and decide at run-time among the large cross-product of possible plans, without grouping them into regions having the same plan [Stoy 08].
Version 5 of DB2 for OS/390 (shipped June 1997) developed a practical approach to force re-optimization for host variables, parameter markers, and special registers by adding new SQL bind options REOPT(ALWAYS) and REOPT(ONCE). The latter re-optimizes the first time that the statement is executed with actual values for the parameters, and assumes that these values will be "typical", whereas the former forces re-optimization each time the statement is run. Later, a REOPT(AUTO) option was added to autonomically determine if re-optimization is needed, based upon the change in the estimated filter factors from the last re-optimization's plan.
Selectivity of join predicates
For example, suppose a fact table of Transactions has dimensions for the Products, Stores, and Dates of each transaction. Though current methods provide accurate selectivity estimates for predicates local to each dimension, e.g., ProductName = 'Dockers' and StoreName = 'San Jose' and Date = '23-Feb-2013', it is impossible to determine the effect of the intersection of these predicates on the fact table. Perhaps the San Jose store had a loss-leader sale on Dockers that day that expired the next day, and a similar sale on some other product the next day, so that the individual selectivities for each day, store, and product appear identical, but the actual sales of Dockers on the two days would be significantly different. It is the interaction of these predicates, through join predicates in this case, that research to date doesn't address. This leads naturally to the final and most challenging problem in our trifecta.
Correlation of columns
My favorite example, which occurred in a customer database, is Make = 'Honda' and Model = 'Accord'. To simplify somewhat, suppose there are 10 Makes and 100 Models. Then the independence (and uniformity) assumption gives us a selectivity of 1/10 * 1/100 = 0.001. But since only Honda makes Accords, by trademark law, the real selectivity is 0.01. So we will under-estimate the cardinality by an order of magnitude. Such optimistic errors are much worse than pessimistic over-estimation errors, because they cause the optimizer to think that certain operations will be cheaper than they really are, causing nasty surprises at run time. The only way to avoid such errors is for the database administrator to be aware of the semantic relationship (a functional dependency, in this case) between those two columns and its consequences, and to collect column group statistics, as DB2 and other database products now allow.
To identify these landmines in the schema automatically, Stillger et al. [Stil 01] developed the LEarning Optimizer (LEO), which opportunistically and automatically compared run-time actual cardinalities to optimizer estimates, to identify column combinations exhibiting such correlation errors. Ilyas et al. [Ilya 04] attacked the problem more pro-actively in CORDS (CORrelation Detection by Sampling), searching somewhat exhaustively for such correlations between any two columns in samples from the data before running any queries. And Markl and colleagues [Mark 05], [Mark 07] have made ground-breaking advances on a consistent way to combine the selectivities of conjuncts in partial results.
All great progress on this problem, but none yet solves the problem of redundant predicates that can be inadvertently introduced by the query writer who typically believes that "more is better", that providing more predicates helps the DBMS do its job better – it's American as Apple Pie! Let me illustrate with one of my favorite war stories.
At a meeting of the International DB2 User's Group, a chief database administrator for a major U.S. insurance company whom I'd helped with occasional bad plans asked me to conduct a class on-site. I suggested it include an exercise on a real problem, unrehearsed. After my class, she obliged me by presenting two 1-inch stacks of paper, each detailing the EXPLAIN of a plan for a query. I feared I was going to embarrass myself and fail miserably under the gun. The queries differed in only one predicate, she said, but the original ran in seconds whereas the one with the extra predicate took over an hour.
I instinctively examined first the cardinality estimates for the results of the two, and the slower one had a cardinality estimate 7 orders of magnitude less than the fast one. When asked what column the extra predicate was on, my host explained that it was a composite key constructed of the first four letters of the policy-holder's last name, the first and middle initials, the zip code, and last four digits of his/her Social Security Number. Did the original query have predicates on all those columns? Of course! And how many rows were there in the table? Ten million. Bingo! I explained that that predicate was completely redundant of the others, and its selectivity, 1/107, when multiplied by the others, underestimated the cardinality by 7 orders of magnitude, wreaking havoc with the plan. It took me maybe 5 minutes to figure this out, and I was immediately dubbed a "genius", but it really was straightforward: the added predicate might help the run-time, especially if they had an index on that column, but it totally threw off the optimizer, which couldn't possibly have detected that redundancy without LEO or CORDS.
So c'mon, folks, let's attack problems that really matter, those that account for optimizer disasters, and stop polishing the round ball.
Disclaimer: The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.
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Dr. Guy M. Lohman is Manager of Disruptive Information Management Architectures in the Advanced Information Management Department at IBM Research Division's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, where he has worked for 32 years. He currently manages the Blink research project, which contributed BLU Acceleration to DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows (LUW) 10.5 (GA'd 2013) and the query engine of the IBM Smart Analytics Optimizer for DB2 for z/OS V1.1 and the Informix Warehouse Accelerator products (2007-2010). Dr. Lohman was the architect of the Query Optimizer of DB2 LUW and was responsible for its development from 1992 to 1997 (versions 2 – 5), as well as the invention and prototyping of Visual Explain, efficient sampling, the DB2 Index Advisor, and optimization of XQuery queries in DB2. Dr. Lohman was elected to the IBM Academy of Technology in 2002 and made an IBM Master Inventor in 2011. He was the General Chair for ACM's 2013 Symposium on Cloud Computing and is the General Co-Chair of the 2015 IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE). Previously, he was on the editorial boards of the "Very Large Data Bases Journal" and "Distributed and Parallel Databases". He is the author of over 75 papers in the refereed academic literature, and has been awarded 39 U.S. patents. His current research interests involve disruptive machine architectures for Business Intelligence, advanced data analytics, query optimization, self-managing database systems, information management appliances, database compression, and autonomic problem determination.
Archive for Databases
Is Query Optimization a "Solved" Problem?
Systems & Databases: Let's Break Down the Walls
After hanging out exclusively with the database community for 35+ years, I've recently become more involved with the systems research community. I have a few observations and recommendations to share.Much of the work published in systems conferences covers topics that would have a natural home in database conferences. For example, transactions and data streams are currently in vogue in the systems field. Here are some recent Best-Paper-award topics: data streams at SOSP 2013, data-parallel query processing at OSDI 2008, and transactions OSDI 2012 and SOSP 2007. Although this topic overlap is increasing lately, it is not just a recent phenomenon. In the last 10+ years, the systems community has taken an interest in data replication, fault tolerance, key-value stores, data-parallel processing (i.e., map-reduce), query processing in sensor networks, and record caching. Some of this work has had a major impact on the database field, e.g., map-reduce and multi-master replication.Yet despite this overlap of topics, there has been remarkably little attendance of database researchers at systems conferences or of systems researchers at database conferences. Not a good thing. And until 2013, I've been part of the problem.
To help break down this barrier, SIGMOD and SIGOPS have sponsored the annual Symposium on Cloud Computing (SoCC) since 2010. Personally, I've found attending SoCC's to be time well spent, and I had a good experience attending ICDCS 2013 in July. So I decided to attend my first SOSP in October, 2013. It was great. The fraction of that program of direct interest to me was as large as any database conference, including work on transactions, data streams, replication, caching, fault tolerance, and scalability. I knew there wouldn't be a huge number of database attendees, but I wasn't prepared to be such an odd duck. At most a dozen attendees out of 600 were card-carrying members of the database community. With few database friends to hang out with, I got to meet a lot more new people than I would at a database event and hear about projects in my areas that I'd wouldn't otherwise have known about. Plus, I could advertise my own work to another group of folks.
If you do systems-oriented database research, then how about picking one systems conference to attend this year? NSDI in Seattle in April, ICDCS in Madrid in late June, or OSDI in Colorado in October. And if you see a systems researcher looking lonely at a database conference, then strike up a conversation. If they feel welcome, perhaps they'll tell others and we'll see more systems attendees at database events.
Given the small overlap of attendees in systems and database conferences, we shouldn't be surprised that the communities have developed different styles of research papers. Since systems papers typically describe mechanisms lower on the stack, they often focus on broader usage scenarios. They value the "ities" more than database papers, e.g., scalability, availability, manageability, and security. They favor simple ideas that work robustly over complex techniques that report improvements for some inputs. They expect a paper to work through the system details in a credible prototype, and to report on lessons learned that are more broadly applicable. They expect more micro-benchmarks that explain the source of performance behavior that's observed, rather than just benchmarks that model usage scenarios, such as TPC.
From attending systems conferences, serving on SoCC program committees (PC's), and submitting an ill-fated paper to a systems conference, I learned a few things about systems conferences that we database folks could learn from:
1. More of their conferences are single-track, and they leave more time for Q&A. This leads to more-polished presentations. When you're presenting a paper to 600 attendees, doing it badly is a career-limiter.
I've always liked CIDR, not only because of its system-building orientation, but also because it's single-track. I'm forced to attend sessions on topics I normally would ignore, and hence I learn more. I think we should try making one of our big conferences single-track: SIGMOD, VLDB or ICDE. One might argue that too many excellent papers are submitted, so it's impractical. I disagree. Here's one way to do it: Have the same acceptance rate as in the past, and all papers are published as usual. However, the PC selects only one-track's worth of papers for presentation slots. The other papers are presented in poster sessions that have no competing parallel sessions. The single-track enables us to learn about more topics, the density of great presentations is higher, and the poster sessions enable us to dig deep on papers of interest to us (as some of our DB conferences already enable us to do). Unless our field stops growing, we really have to do something like this. Our conferences have already gotten out of hand with as many as seven parallel sessions.
2. When describing related work, systems papers cast a wider net. Their goal is often not simply to demonstrate that the paper's contributions are novel, but also to educate the reader about lines of work that are loosely related to the paper's topic. To help enable this breadth, they've recently settled on a formula where references don't count toward the paper's maximum page count. We should adopt this view in the database community. One self-serving benefit is that papers would cite more references, which would increase all of our citation counts.
3. There's a widespread belief that systems PC's write longer, more constructive reviews. I think DB PC's have been improving in this respect, but on average we're not up to the systems' standard.
4. They usually shepherd all papers, to ensure that authors incorporate recommended changes. This also gives the authors someone to ask about ambiguous recommendations. We should do this too.
5. They typically require 10pt font. As a courtesy to those of us over a certain age, whose eyes aren't what they used to be, we should do this, and increase the page count to maintain the same paper length.
6. At SOSP and OSDI, they post all slide decks and videos of all presentations. Obviously worthwhile. We sometimes post slide decks and videos only for plenaries. Let's do better.
There are a few aspects of systems conferences that I'm less enthusiastic about.
1. Systems conferences favor live PC meetings. They do have benefits. It's educational for PC members to hear discussions of papers they didn't review and for young researchers to see how decisions are reached. Since all PC members hear every paper discussion, non-reviewers can bring up points that neutralize inappropriate criticisms or raise issues that escaped reviewers' attention, which reduces the randomness of decisions. However, there are also negatives. In borderline cases, the most articulate, quick-thinking, and extroverted PC members have an inappropriate advantage in getting their way. And inevitably, some PC members can't attend the meeting, due to a schedule conflict or the travel expense, so the papers they reviewed get short shrift.
On balance, I don't think the decisions produced by live PC meetings are enough better than on-line discussions to be worth what they cost. Perhaps we can get some of the benefits of a PC meeting by allowing PC members to see the reviews and discussions of all papers for which they don't have a conflict, late in the discussion period (which we did some years ago). With large PC's, this might constitute public disclosure, in which case patents would have to be filed before submission, which will delay the publication of some work. But if we think a broader vetting of papers is beneficial, this might be worth trying.
2. During the reviewing process of a systems conference, if a paper seems borderline, then the PC chairs solicit more reviews. These reviews do offer a different perspective on the interest-value of the work. But they are usually not as detailed as the initial ones and may be by less-expert reviewers. It's common to receive 5 or 6 reviews of a paper submitted to a systems conference. As an author it's nice to get this feedback. And it might reduce the randomness of decisions. But it significantly increases the reviewing load on PC's. In database PC's, we rarely, if ever, do this. In my opinion, it's usually better to hold reviewers' feet to the fire and make them decide. Still, we'd benefit from getting 4 or 5 reviews more often than never, but not as often as systems conferences.
3. Systems conferences publish very few industry papers and rarely have an industry track. In my experience, an industry paper is judged just like a research paper, but with a somewhat lower quality bar. This is unfortunate. Researchers and practitioners benefit from reading about the functionality and internals of state-of-the-art products, even if they are only modestly innovative, especially if they are widely used. The systems community would serve their audience better by publishing more such papers.
4. The reviewing load for systems PC's is nearly double that of DB PC's, so systems PC's are proportionally smaller. E.g., SOSP 2013 had 160 submissions and 28 PC members. If each paper had three reviews, that's 17 reviews per PC member. With five reviews/paper, that's 29 reviews per PC member. If DB conferences cranked up the reviewing load, then we'd probably participate in fewer PC's, so the workload on each of us might be unchanged. A PC member would see more of the submissions in each area of expertise, which might help reduce the randomness of decisions … maybe. Overall, I don't see a compelling argument to change, but it's debatable.
5. Like some DB conferences, many systems conferences have adopted double-blind reviewing. I am not a fan. For papers describing a system project, I find it hard to review and, in some cases, impossible to write a paper for a double-blind conference. I have chosen not to submit some papers to double-blind conferences. I know I am not alone in this.
In summary, the systems and DB areas have become much closer in recent years. Each community has something to learn from the other area's technical contributions and point-of-view and from its approach to conferences and publications. We really would benefit from talking to each other a lot more than we do.
Acknowledgments: My thanks to Gustavo Alonso, Surajit Chaudhuri, Sudipto Das, Sameh Elnikety, Mike Franklin, and Sergey Melnik for contributing some of the ideas in this blog post.
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Philip A. Bernstein is a Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft Research. Over the past 35 years, he has been a product architect at Microsoft and Digital Equipment Corp., a professor at Harvard University and Wang Institute of Graduate Studies, and a VP Software at Sequoia Systems. During that time, he has published papers and two books on the theory and implementation of database systems, especially on transaction processing and data integration, which are still the major focus of his research. He is an ACM Fellow, a winner of the ACM SIGMOD Innovations Award, a member of the Washington State Academy of Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He received a B.S. degree from Cornell and M.Sc. and Ph.D. from University of Toronto.
Are Databases ready for Gestural Workloads?
In 2011, I was traveling on the Kolkata Metro when I made an interesting observation. Nearly every passenger around me was using a computing device of some sort. Some were playing with their smartphones, some with their tablets, some listening to music on their iPod Touches. Each was a consumer of structured data of some sort; interacting with their email, Facebook, or music catalog. Weeks later, while on a flight, this pattern came up again — every seat in the plane was equipped with a touch-driven entertainment system, some used while sifting through book pages on e-Readers. Clearly, the notion of a "computer" for the future generation looks very different from the past!
Over time, we seem to be converging to a vision where we are surrounded by computing devices of varying capacities, with users performing both simple and complex tasks, with a common attribute — these devices do not possess keyboards. In 2011, smartphones and tablets outsold workstations and portable computers by 1.5x. In 2013, this ratio is projected to reach 4x. Based on this trend, non-keyboard interaction (typically in the form of gestures) is on-track to be the dominant mode of data interaction.
Gesture-driven applications pose a very different workload to underlying databases than traditional ones. Consider the idea of scrolling through a page of text, which is typically implemented as a
Another example of an interesting gestural interaction is that of the Interactive Join. As part of the GestureDB system we are developing in my group, the GestureQuery multitouch interface lets you compose two relations into an equijoin by simply dragging them together on the specific attributes:
In the interactive join, assuming all attributes are of the same data type, there could be M x N possible
The following interactive demo lets you play around with a real multitouch interaction trace from one of our user studies, collected from interactions with our GestureQuery iPad prototype2. The subject was asked to perform an equijoin
This interaction is an great example of query intent transition. As the gesture is being articulated, the distribution changes rapidly. The "Proximity Score" is the score for
Just like the previous example, challenges arise here. Can a database provide join results at such low latency for such a diverse number of queries being fired at the same time, given such rapidly changing probabilities? It is not practical for the database to execute them all in parallel. Given that we know the domain of possible queries, is there scope for multiquery optimization? Second, given an interactive threshold of say 100ms for the results, is it feasible (or even useful) to generate full results for all queries? Should we consider partial query execution? Or can we simply sample the tables to provide interactive (albeit inaccurate) results? Third, feedback for a query is useful only for a fleeting moment during the gesture articulation. How could we show parts (i.e. rank tuples) of the result that are most useful?
Clearly, when working with gesture-driven interfaces and application layers, the gestural workloads of database queries pose a smorgasbord of challenges, that might require rethinking of the entire database stack. As these interfaces evolve, the underlying database systems will have to keep up with changes in user expectations and demands. With the explosion of new and novel gestural interfaces, natural interfaces and casual computing lately, it's an exciting time for database research!
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Arnab Nandi is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at The Ohio State University. Arnab's research is in the area of database systems, focusing on challenges in big data analytics and data interaction. The goal of his group's work is to allow end-users to explore and interact with semi-structured and structured data. Prior to joining Ohio State, Arnab did his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, with stints at Google, Yahoo! Research, and Microsoft Research.
Ontology-based Data Management
Figure 1 shows a portion of a relational table contained in a real, large information system. The table concerns the customers of an organization, where each row stores data about a single customer. The first column contains her code (if the code is negative, then the record refers to a special customer, called "fictitious"), columns 2 and 3 specify the time interval of validity for the record, ID_GROUP indicates the group the customer belongs to (if the value of FLAG_CP is "S", then the customer is the leader of the group, and if FLAG_CF is "S", then the customer is the controller of the group), FATTURATO is the annual turnover (but the value is valid only if FLAG_FATT is "S"). Obviously, each notion mentioned above (like "fictitious", "group", "leader", etc.) has a specific meaning in the organization, and understanding such meaning is crucial if one wants to correctly manage the data in the table and extract information out of it. Similar rules hold for the other 47 columns that, for lack of space, are not shown in the figure.
Figure 1: A portion of the Customer table in a database of a large organization.
Those who have experience of large databases, or databases that are part of large information systems will not be surprised to see such complexity in a single data structure. Now, think of a database with many tables of this kind, and try to imagine a poor final user accessing such tables to extract useful information. The problem is even more severe if one considers that information systems in the real world use different (often many) heterogeneous data sources, both internal and external to the organization. Finally, if we add to the picture the (inevitable) need of dealing with big data, and consider in particular the two v's of "volume" and "velocity", we can easily understand why effectively accessing, integrating and managing data in complex organizations is still one of the main issues faced by IT industry nowadays.
Issues in governing complex information systems
The above is a simple example motivating the claim that governing the resources (data, meta-data, services, processes, etc.) of modern information systems is still an outstanding problem. I would like to go in more detail on three important aspects related to this issue.
Accessing and querying data. Although the initial design of a collection of data sources might be adequate, corrective maintenance actions tend to re-shape them into a form that often diverges from the original structure. Also, they are often subject to changes so as to adapt to specific, application-dependent needs. Analogously, applications are continuously modified for accommodating new requirements, and guaranteeing their seamless usage within the organization is costly. The result is that the data stored in different sources and the processes operating over them tend to be redundant, mutually inconsistent, and obscure for large classes of users. So, query formulation often requires interacting with IT experts who know where the data are and what they mean in the various contexts, and can therefore translate the information need expressed by the user into appropriate queries. It is not rare to see organizations where this process requires domain experts to send a request to the data management staff and wait for several days (or even weeks, at least in some Public Administrations in Italy…) before they receive a (possibly inappropriate) query in response. In summary, it is often exceedingly difficult for end users to single out exactly the data that are relevant for them, even though they are perfectly able to describe their requirement in terms of business concepts.
Data quality. It is often claimed that data quality is one of the most important factors in delivering high value information services. However, the above-mentioned scenario poses several obstacles to the goal of even checking data quality, let alone achieving a good level of quality in information delivery. How can we possibly specify data quality requirements, if we do not have a clear understanding of the semantics that data should bring? The problem is sharpened by the need of connecting to external data, originating, for example, from business partners, suppliers, clients, or even public sources. Again, judging about the quality of external data, and deciding whether to reconcile possible inconsistencies or simply adding such data as different views, cannot be done without a deep understanding of their meaning. Note that data quality is also crucial for opening data to external organizations. The demand of greater openness is irresistible nowadays. Private companies are pushed to open their resources to third parties, so as to favor collaborations and new business opportunities. In public administrations, opening up data is underpinning public service reforms in several countries, by offering people informed choices that simply have not existed before, thus driving towards improvements in the services to the citizens.
Process and service specification. Information systems are crucial artifacts for running organizations, and organizations rely not only on data, but also, for instance, on processes and services. Designing, documenting, managing, and executing processes is an important aspect of information systems. However, specifying what a process/service does, or which characteristics it is supposed to have, cannot be done correctly and comprehensively without a clear specification of which data the process will access, and how it will possibly change such data. The difficulties of doing that in a satisfactory way come from various factors, including the lack of modeling languages and tools for describing process and data holistically. However, the problems related to the semantics of data that we discussed above undoubtedly make the task even harder.
A (new?) paradigm
In the last five years, I (and my group in Roma) have been working on a new paradigm addressing these issues, based on the use of knowledge representation and reasoning techniques, and I want to share my excitement about it with the readers of this blog. The paradigm is called "Ontology-based Data Management" (OBDM), and requires structuring the information system into four layers.
The distinguishing feature of the whole approach is that users of the system will be freed from all the details of how to use the resources, as they will express their needs in the terms of the DKB. The system will reason about the DKB and the mappings, and will reformulate the needs in terms of appropriate calls to services provided by resources. Thus, for instance, a user query will be formulated over the domain ontology, and the system will reason upon the ontology and the mappings to call suitable queries over data sources that will compute the answers to the original user query.
As you can see, the heart of the approach is the DKB, and the core of the DKB is the ontology. So, what is new? Indeed, I can almost hear many of you saying: what is the difference with data integration (where the global schema plays the role of the ontology)? And what is the difference with conceptual modeling (where the conceptual schema plays the role of the ontology)? And what about Knowledge Representation in AI (where the axioms of the knowledge base play the role of the DKB)? The answer is simple: almost none. Indeed, OBDA builds on all the above disciplines (and others), but with the goal of going beyond what they currently provide for solving the problems that people encounter in the governance of complex information systems. At the same time, there are a few (crucial, at least for me) facts that make OBDA a novel paradigm to experiment and study. Here is a list of the most important ones:
A lot more to do
A few research groups are experimenting OBDM in practice (see, for example, the Optique IP project, financed by the Seventh Framework Program (FP7) of the European Commission). In Rome, we are involved in applied projects both with Public Administrations, and with private companies. One of the experiences we are carrying out is with the Department of Treasury of the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance. In this project, three ontology experts from our department worked with three domain experts for six months, and built an ontology of 800 elements, with 3000 DL-Lite axioms, and 800 mapping assertions to about 80 relational tables. The ontology is now used as a common framework for all the applications, and will constitute the main document specifying the requirement for the restructuring of the information system that will be carried out in the next future. We are actually lucky to live in Rome, not only because it is a magnificent city, but also because Italian Public Administrations, many of which are located in the Eternal City, provide perfect examples of all the problems that make OBDM interesting and potentially useful…
The first experiences we have conducted are very promising, but OBDM is a young paradigm, and therefore it needs attention and care. This means that there are many issues to be addressed to make it really effectively work in practice. Let me briefly illustrate some of them. One big issue is how to build and maintain the ontology (and, more generally, the DKB). I know that this is one of the most important criticisms to all the approaches requiring a considerable modeling effort. My answer to these is that all modeling efforts are investments, and when we judge about investments we should talk not only about costs, but also about benefits. Also, take into account that OBDM works in a "pay-as-you-go" fashion: users have interesting advantages even with a very incomplete domain description, as the system can reason about an incomplete specification, and try to get the best out of it. Another important issue is evolution. Evolution in OBDM concerns not only the data at the sources (updates), but also the ontology, and the mappings. Indeed, both the domain description, and the resources continue to evolve, and all the components of the system should keep up with these modifications. Not surprisingly, this is one issue where more research is still desperately needed. Overall, the DKB and the mappings constitute the meta-data of the OBDM system, and in complex organizations, such meta-data can be huge and difficult to control and organize. Talking in terms of a fashionable terminology, with OBDM we face not only the problem of Big Data, but also the problem of Big Meta-Data. Another issue that needs to be further studied and explored is the relationship between the static aspects and the dynamic aspects of the DKB, together with the problem of mapping processes and services specified at the conceptual level to computational resources in applications.
I really hope that this blog have somehow triggered your attention to OBDM, and that you will consider looking at it more closely, for example for carrying out some experiments, or for doing research on at least some of its many open problems that still remain to be studied.
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Maurizio Lenzerini is a full professor in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Rome La Sapienza, where he is leading a research group on Databases and Artificial Intelligence. His main research interests are in database theory, data and service and integration, ontology languages, knowledge representation and reasoning, and component-based software development. He is a former Chair and a current member of the Executive Committee of ACM PODS (Principles of Database Systems). He is an ACM Fellow, an ECAI (European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence) fellow, and a member of the Academia Europaea – The Academy of Europe.
Where's the Data in the Big Data Wave?
Big Data should be Interesting Data!
There are various definitions of Big Data; most center around a number of V's like volume, velocity, variety, veracity – in short: interesting data (interesting in at least one aspect). However, when you look into research papers on Big Data, in SIGMOD, VLDB, or ICDE, the data that you see here in experimental studies is utterly boring. Performance and scalability experiments are often based on the TPC-H benchmark: completely synthetic data with a synthetic workload that has been beaten to death for the last twenty years. Data quality, data cleaning, and data integration studies are often based on bibliographic data from DBLP, usually old versions with less than a million publications, prolific authors, and curated records. I doubt that this is a real challenge for tasks like entity linkage or data cleaning. So where's the – interesting – data in Big Data research?
Surely, companies have their own interesting data, and industrial labs have access to such data and real-life workloads. However, all this is proprietary and out of reach for academic research. Therefore, many researchers resort to the good old TPC-H benchmark and DBLP records and call it Big Data. Insights from TPC-H and DBLP are, however, usually not generalizable to interesting and truly challenging data and workloads. Yes, there are positive exceptions; I just refer to a general trend.
Looking Across the Fence: Experimental Data in other Research Communities
Now that I got you alerted, let me be constructive. I have also worked in research communities other than database systems: information retrieval, Web and Semantic Web, knowledge management (yes, a bit of AI), and recently also computational linguistics (aka. NLP). These communities have a different mindset towards data resources and their use in experimental work. To them, data resources like Web corpora, annotated texts, or inter-linked knowledge bases are vital assets for conducting experiments and measuring the progress in the field. These are not static benchmarks that are defined once every ten years; rather, relevant resources are continuously crafted and their role in experiments is continuously re-thought. For example, the IR community has new experimental tasks and competitions in the TREC, INEX, and CLEF conferences each year. Computational linguistics has an established culture of including the availability of data resources and experimental data (such as detailed ground-truth annotations) in the evaluation of submissions to their top conferences like ACL, EMNLP, CoNLL, and LREC. Review forms capture this aspect as an important dimension for all papers, not just for a handful of specific papers tagged Experiments & Analyses.
Even the Semantic Web community has successfully created a huge dataset for experiments: the Web of Linked Data consisting of more than 30 Billion RDF triples from hundreds of data sources with entity-level sameAs linkage across sources. What an irony: ten years ago we database folks thought of Semantic Web people as living in the ivory tower, and now they have more data to play with than we (academic database folks) can dream of.
Towards a Culture Shift in Our Community
Does our community lack the creativity and agility that other communities exhibit? I don't think so. Rather I believe the problem lies in our publication and experimental culture. Aspects of this topic were discussed in earlier posts on the SIGMOD blog, but I want to address a new angle. We have over-emphasized publications as an achievement by itself: our community's currency is the paper count rather than the intellectual insight and re-usable contribution. Making re-usable software available is appreciated, but it's a small point in the academic value system when it comes to hiring, tenure, or promotion decisions. Contributing data resources plays an even smaller role. We need to change this situation by rewarding work on interesting data resources (and equally on open-source software): compiling the data, making it available to the community, and using it in experiments.
There are plenty of good starting points. The Web of Linked Data, with general-purpose knowledge bases (DBpedia, Freebase, Yago) and a wealth of thematically focused high-quality sources (e.g., musicbrainz, geospecies, openstreetmap, etc.), is a great opportunity. This data is huge, structured but highly heterogeneous, and includes substantial parts of uncertain or incomplete nature. Internet archives and Web tables (embedded in HTML pages) are further examples; enormous amounts of interesting data are easily and legally available by crawling or download. Finally, in times when energy, traffic, environment, health, and general sustainability are key challenges on our planet, more and more data by public stakeholders is freely available. Large amounts of structured and statistical data can be accessed at organizations like OECD, WHO, Eurostat, and many others.
Merely pointing to these opportunities is not enough. We must give more incentives that papers do indeed provide new interesting data resources and open-source software. The least thing to do is to extend review reports to include the contribution of novel data and software. A more far-reaching step is to make data and experiments an essential part of the academic currency: how many of your papers contributed data resources, how many contributed open-source software? This should matter in hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions. Needless to say, all this applies to non-trivial, value-adding data resource contributions. Merely converting a relational database into another format is not a big deal.
I believe that computational linguistics is a great role model for experimental culture and the value of data. Papers in premier conferences earn extra credit when accompanied with data resources, and there are highly reputed conferences like LREC which are dedicated to this theme. Moreover, papers of this kind or even the data resources themselves are frequently cited. Why don't we, the database community, adopt this kind of culture and give data and data-driven experiments the role that they deserve in the era of Big Data?
Is the Grass Always Greener on the Other Side of the Fence?
Some people may argue that rapidly changing setups for data-driven experiments are not viable in our community. In the extreme, every paper could come with its own data resources, making it harder to ensure the reproducibility of experimental results. So we should better stick to established benchmarks like TPC-H and DBLP author cleaning. This is the opponent's argument. I think the argument that more data resources hinder repeatability is flawed and merely a cheap excuse. Rather, a higher rate of new data resources and experimental setups goes very well with calling upon the authors' obligation to ensure reproducible results. The key is to make the publication of data and full details of experiments mandatory. This could be easily implemented in the form of supplementary material that accompanies paper submissions and, for accepted papers, would also be archived in the publication repository.
Another argument could be that Big Data is too big to effectively share. However, volume is only one of the criteria for making a dataset Big Data, that is, interesting for research. We can certainly make 100 Gigabytes available for download, and organizations like NIST (running TREC), LDC (hosting NLP data), and the Internet Archive prove that even Terabytes can be shared by asking interested teams to pay a few hundred dollars for shipping disks.
A caveat that is harder to counter is that real-life workloads are so business-critical that they can impossibly be shared. Yes, there were small scandals about query-and-click logs from search engines as they were not properly anonymized. However, the fact that engineers did not do a good job in these cases does not mean that releasing logs and workloads is out of the question. Why would it be impossible to publish a small representative sample of analytic queries over Internet traffic data or advertisement data? Moreover, if we focus on public data hosted by public services, wouldn't it be easy to share frequently posed queries?
Finally, a critical issue to ponder on is the position of industrial research labs. In the SIGMOD repeatability discussion a few years ago, they made it a point that software cannot be disclosed. Making experimental data available is a totally different issue, and would actually avoid the problem with proprietary software. Unfortunately, we sometimes see papers from industrial labs that show impressive experiments, but don't give details nor any data and leave zero chance for others to validate the papers' findings. Such publications that crucially hinge on non-disclosed experiments violate a major principle of good science: the falsifiability of hypotheses, as formulated by the Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper. So what should industrial research groups do (in my humble opinion)? They should use public data in experiments and/or make their data public (e.g., in anonymized or truncated form, but in the same form that is used in the experiments). Good examples in the past include the N-gram corpora that Microsoft and Google released. Papers may use proprietary data in addition, but when a paper's contribution lives or dies with a large non-disclosed experiment, the paper cannot be properly reviewed by the open research community. For such papers, which can still be insightful, conferences have industrial tracks.
Last but not least, who could possibly act on this? Or is all this merely public whining, without addressing any stakeholders? An obvious answer is that the steering boards and program chairs of our conferences should reflect and discuss these points. It should not be a complex maneuver to extend the reviewing criteria for the research tracks of SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE, etc. This would be a step in the right direction. Of course, truly changing the experimental culture in our community and influencing the scholarly currency in the academic world is a long-term process. It is a process that affects all of us, and should be driven by each of you. Give this some thought when writing your next paper with data-intensive experiments.
Take-Home Message
The above considerations are food for thought, not a recipe. If you prefer a concise set of tenets and recommendations at the risk of oversimplification, here is my bottom line:
Overall, we need a culture shift to encourage more work on interesting data for experimental research in the Big Data wave.
| Blogger's Profile:
Gerhard Weikum Gerhard Weikum is a Research Director at the Max-Planck Institute for Informatics (MPII) in Saarbruecken, Germany, where he is leading the department on databases and information systems. He is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Computer Science of Saarland University in Saarbruecken, Germany, and he is a principal investigator of the Cluster of Excellence on Multimodal Computing and Interaction. Earlier he held positions at Saarland University in Saarbruecken, Germany, at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, at MCC in Austin, Texas, and he was a visiting senior researcher at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington. He received his diploma and doctoral degrees from the University of Darmstadt, Germany.


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Originally written on Gridiron Grit | Last updated 6/5/13
DENVER - SEPTEMBER 3: Wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald #11 of the Arizona Cardinals points as he runs on a thirty six yard reception in the first quarter during the NFL preseason game against the Denver Broncos at Invesco Field at Mile High on September 3, 2009 in Denver, Colorado. (Photo by Doug Pensinger/Getty Images)
For the first time since 2007, Arizona Cardinals wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald is having to study at night during the offseason—along with head coach Bruce Arians—in order to learn three positions in a new offense. As Kent Somers of AZCentral.com notes, Fitzgerald is often "uncomfortable, unsure and left wondering how much he really knows about playing receiver" in his new role and "that is by design." "They don't like for you to come in and think, 'Oh, it's just another day at the office,' " Fitzgerald said. "No, that's not how it is. It's like being in a cold tub every morning. They push you in there, and it's like a shock to the body." Photo Credit: AZCardinals.com Fitzgerald, 29, used to line up exclusively in the "X" spot in Ken Whisenhunt's offense. Now, he's having to study his usual position and two new spots at "Z" (flanker) and the "F," which is sort of a slot position. And the 6-3, 218-pound wide out is never sure what's going to be on th
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27 year old man | Arlington, TX, USA | Seeking women 22-30 within 70 miles
I ran away from a bear once, but I'd never run away from a good girl.
I'm a native Texan, and grew up taking care of a bunch of animals out in the country. I appreciate how my parents taught me the value of hard work, and how to properly treat a lady, but I was happy to head off to Texas A&M and forge my own path after graduating high school. I'm a creative person, and have been really interested in graphic design all my life. I majored in Visualization at Texas A&M where I got to learn from designers at Pixar and other companies on how to create computer graphics for movies, TV shows and games. Texas A&M was a great place that allowed me to study abroad in Germany my junior year. Made a lot of friends there and definitely benefitted from seeing a different culture. Never got to meet David Hasselhoff though. Maybe next time. Right now I'm working with a wholesaler. Basically I design and redesign packaging for products in stores like Bed Bath and Beyond. If you've got a leopard print robe, there's a pretty good chance I designed the packaging for it at work. I get to learn a lot and use my creativity at work every day. I'm looking for someone I can start a relationship with. I love movies, indie music, concerts, and going to Texas Rangers games. I'd love to start seeing a woman who has a fun sense of humor, and who can hold her own in an intellectual conversation. I want a girl who feels comfortable out at a baseball game, drinking a beer or two on the weekend, or just taking it easy with a good movie at home. And I want a girl who I can explore the world with, and who isn't afraid of a little adventure now and then.
Coffee and conversation , Dining out , Movies/Videos , Museums and art , Music and concerts , Exploring new areas , Playing sports , Travel/Sightseeing , Video games , Watching sports
Baseball, Basketball, Tennis / Racquet sports, Walking / Hiking
I exercise 1-2 times per week.
I like Dogs
I grew up with a blue heeler who I love to visit when I go home. She's really smart and spends her days sleeping and attempting to herd cattle at my parents' farm.
Middle of the Road
My favorite bar is Oak Street Draft House in Denton, very chill and great selection of beers. I love attending Ranger, Maverick, and Stars games. I also can appreciate a cool museum, whether it is art or history.
Texas A&M University, College Station, TX
Some of my favorite movies are Sherlock Holmes, Wes Anderson films, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. The Walking Dead, Breaking Bad, and Game of Thrones are all TV shows that I can't miss. I listen to all kinds of music, favorite though is indie.
Z{{Cta}} {{#if HasMoreInfo}} ?{{CtaSecondary}} {{/if}}
|What he is looking for
|6'3" (190cms)
|5'0" (152cms) to 6'3" (190cms)
|Body type:
|Slender, About average, Athletic and toned
|No preference
|Dark brown
|No preference
|No Way
|No Way, Yes, but trying to quit
|Social Drinker
|Social Drinker
|Sales / Marketing
|No preference
I work for a wholesaler where I do a little bit of everything. Mostly I'm used to design/redesign packaging for products and visuals for meetings with clients.
|I'll tell you later
|No preference
|Never Married
|Never Married
|Have kids:
|Wants kids:
|Definitely, Someday, Not sure
|White / Caucasian
|No preference
|I'll tell you later
|No preference
|No preference
|Bachelors degree
|Some college, Associates degree, Bachelors degree
I graduated from Texas A&M University with a degree in Visualization. What's Visualization you ask? It pretty much encompasses all types of design such as 3D modeling, painting, graphic design and film.


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Anyone make motorcycle Tire chains?
Anyone ever make winter motorcycle tire chains for thier bikes? Post a picture please and some info.
we use those quite regularly
now the "Winter-Rider Tipps in German; a bit down the page you find a picture series of how to build a chain yourself; maybe some software can help with the german
have fun
asphaltmueller Those are awesome. Way better than the one we've made from old drive chains and cable.
Here is one way. http://www.advrider.com/forums/showt...ht=snow+chains
kijiji Canada
I saw these on Kijiji in Alberta. $375.00. That's pretty tall coin if you ask me.
After about 10 minutes, I had this:
I didn't rivet the strap to the cam buckle, I just used safety pins to mock it up. To do it like Allgo did, you would need 8 sets of this for each wheel. I made this one for the rear, however, if I was making a whole set, I would probably shorten the chain portion. In the picture, the chain is about 8", but that leaves some of the chain on the sidewall, which probably isn't necessary. For the record, this was on a D606.
Here is a breakdown of what I (would) have into 1/8 of a set.
(1) cam buckle- $1.49ea.
(1.25") 1" nylon webbing- $.29 per foot
(2) D-Rings -$.50 ea.
(6") twisted 3/8'' chain - $2.29 per foot
So, about 4 bucks per "chain"
However, this setup isn't using the vbar snow chain, this is just regular chain. I don't think the regular chain would be very helpful on my rear, though, since the chain sits lower in the tire than the knobs.
It would also be nice if the cam buckles would fit between my spokes, but they don't very well, so they would have to be offset more on the side of the rim. This probably wouldn't be too big of a deal, since with the chains, one would be riding at slow speed and you could balance them out by having 4 favoring one side and 4 favoring the other.
The regular twisted chain that I have, may work ok on my front, since it does stick out slightly more than the knobs.
For the chain, I did find this set of ATV vbar snow chains for 20$ shipped, which seems pretty reasonable, if they will stick out beyond the knobs enough to catch.
Check above out
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/0m-PmbIRRDw" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Old timers used to wind 1/2 manilla rope around their Model A wheels, eventually circling the entire wheel/tire . . . .
it worked well, and would self-uninstall when dry pavement was hit ;-}
I would mainly like mine to help with traction so I could ride snow covered single track and possibly play on the ice.
3/4 of the way down the page.
on the center picture,i think it is an BMW GS,where do you find these snow chain?
they looked no1 for me.
Mikesova - those D rings look weak, as they aren't welded on the flat side where the ends meet. Are you confident that they won't pull open? A tire chain flung off while moving could be dangerous, especially if into your drive chain.
I got about 75% of the way through making a set out of old car chains last winter... then it never snowed (WA) and I never got to try them. Then this summer I moved to MI and figured I should finish them, only to find out it's illegal in MI to use chains OR studded tires, as if there's any possible way to do MORE damage to the bullshit that passes as "roads" here
So as of now, I've got a front and 1/2 a rear chain sitting in a case in the garage. Guess that's one more welding project to add to the list of shit-to-do this long cold winter!
Grip studs, just select your size and be done with it.
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"Uma realidade paralela no centro de uma cidade lindíssima. O quarto foi para nós um retiro e o pessoal de uma simpatia tremenda.
Agora é voltar até conhecer todos os quartos...!"
"Arquitectura cálida, diseño de calidad y vanguardista, trato exquisito, cercano y profesional, situación inmejorable justo en el centro de la parte vieja y moderna de la ciudad. En resumen, una experiencia fabulosa que sin ninguna duda repetiremos."
"My wife and I stayed at the Casa do Conto in July 2011 and I can say without a doubt that this was a great experience! We were guests at this truly unique hotel for almost a week and from the moment we arrived to the moment we left Alexandra and Tito made us feel like family much more than guests. I travel the world for busines and have never stayed anywhere that felt so full of life and where we felt so warmly cared for. To call this a hotel is not to do it justice. This will be our home away from home whenever we visit Porto and I believe that we've found wonderful new friends in the owners and staff in this beautiful city."


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1. Assemble a solar cooker with a black stoneware bowl with a lid within a larger glass bowl placed on a reflector.
2. In a bowl, take the potatoes, sausage and corn.
3. Mix in the spice blend,and season with salt and pepper.
4. Place it in the stone ware bowl and let it cook in the sun for 1 hour and 30 minutes.
5. Add in the shrimp and let it cook for another 2 hour and 45 minutes.
6. Plate it and serve it hot.


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1 Seaport Ln, Boston, MA 02210
This review is for breakfast only- I recently dined at Aura for breakfast while attending a convention at the WTC. The staff was amazingly helpful and friendly. However, the food clearly does not meet the expectations or the level of class that the hotel exudes. I ordered a simple meal, poached eggs with a side of bacon- It arrived on the same plate as a side of hash brown potatoes (which I am also allergic to and let my server know prior to ordering)- the eggs were served in a small dish which was flaking off teflon- there were also chunks of something that appeared to be toast or bread in my poached eggs (I have celiac and cannot tolerate any amount of gluten...also told to my server)- the few bites of egg I had (prior to discovering the teflon and gluten) tasted strongly of vinegar and were bordering on inedible. I spent $25 on 2 pieces of bacon and a cup of coffee and ended up sick for 2 days due to cross contamination.
270 Northern Ave, Boston, MA 02210
Amazing Meal- Legal really is the top when it comes to working with food allergic guests- Well prepared food with lots of variety to choose from! GF menu choices are now indicated in the main menu- They even bring out warm gf dinner rolls (made locally by Something Sweet Without Wheat)- Our server was friendly, personable and very helpful-
70 Worcester-Providence Turnpike, Millbury, MA 01527
Hit or Miss- when they are attentive, it's spot on- dedicated gf fryer, variety of menu options, etc...when they aren't, it's a gluten nightmare- however, it is usually safe...nine times out of ten, you will get a safe and good meal but...I have been glutened and for us celiacs, one time is once too many...
160 Bank St, Burlington, VT 05401
Always very accommodating- never had a bad experience here!!!! Great ciders on tap and the food is just fantastic- lots of creative gf options- (I highly recommend a burger with a fried egg, cheddar, and bacon over mixed local greens)
2 School Street, Fiskdale, MA 01518
Went here based on the recommendation of several friends and other reviews- Waitress was VERY accommodating and I think they want to do things right- She checked with the kitchen numerous times about gf menu options- Was even offered the ability to prepare a special entree to meet my allergy needs including subbing gluten free pasta instead of risotto...Unfortunately, brussels sprouts caesar salad came out with croutons on it despite ordering gluten free- when sent back, it was returned with them pulled off. Had to send back a third time requesting a new order to be made. I don't know if it was or not...Hard to trust a kitchen when this happens...Lamb was prepared extremely rare as well (ordered medium)- Kitchens have off nights...maybe this was one of them?
50 Boston Turnpike, Shrewsbury, MA 01545
lots of gluten free menu options but staff really needs to be trained about cross contamination. Using naturally gluten free ingredients and offering a gluten free bun does not mean that you are safe for those of us with celiac- I asked specifically for the cooks to change their gloves, and was assured that they would by the manager, then watched as the kitchen staff prepared my food using the same gloves they had on and prepared other orders with- including handling the raw meat-They also put the gluten free bun on the exact spot where a regular bun was moments before- needless to say, I didn't eat my meal...
771 Southbridge Street, Auburn, MA 01501
Wide and varied menu with a lot of GF options- Staff was very pleasant and gluten aware- however, I am extremely sensitive to cross contamination and was glutened despite their best efforts- if you can handle minute amounts of gluten, you will be fine; however if you cannot tolerate any gluten whatsoever, you may want to try other options.
111 Shrewsbury St, Worcester, MA 01604
Owned by the Sole Proprietor and Via Italian Table which are known for their dedicated gluten free menus- Very good with handling other allergies as well- Consistently excellent food with a lot of options- including grass fed filet! I've never had any issues with cross contamination here- Worth the splurge!
1000 West Columbus Avenue, Springfield, MA 01105
Several excellent gluten free options- including gluten free beer- no dedicated fryer but clearly marked which items are shared- manager comes out with the gluten free menu-
376 Main Street, Sturbridge, MA 01566
Outstanding- staff and chef are very knowledgeable of gluten intolerance (as well as other allergies)- head chef/owner prepared a special dish using separate cookware and utensils. Food is extremely high quality- great cocktail menu and wine list plus gf cider on draft!


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Canine walk in Simi Valley raises money for American Cancer Society
Every size, shape and breed of canine turned out for the Bark for Life to benefit the American Cancer Society on Sunday in Simi Valley.
Laura Leonard found the event three years ago in Pottstown, Pa., when she was looking online for fundraisers after her father died of cancer.
She said she replicates it here " to bring our canine companion community together to fight cancer and to celebrate our canine companions who love us unconditionally."
Leonard said organizers expected about 100 dogs and 300 people at Lemon Park and that she hoped to raise $15,000.
Samantha Daily, 9, who was walking Leonard's dog, Barkley, came from West Los Angeles with her father, David, in his friend's Ferrari — or Furrari, as it was dubbed for the day — to be stuffed with donations of food, blankets, treats and dog items.
Opening ceremonies included Simi Valley Mayor Bob Huber, a self-described "dog person."
"I'm fortunate to take my dog to work every day," he said.
Grand marshal Theresa Rhyne wrote the book "The Dog Lived (and so Will I)." Her 2½-year-old rescue dog was diagnosed with cancer and given a prognosis of one year with surgery and chemotherapy but lived for nine years. Then three years into her dog's ordeal, Rhyne was diagnosed with cancer as well.
The Greens came with Roxy and Spicy, their two Chiweenies — Chihuahua and dachshund mixes — to support the cause.
"Also, our new puppy, Roxy, is from a rescue and scared of dogs and new people, so we wanted to bring her out and do a little socialization," said Leanne Green, of Simi Valley.
Koda and Chichu, Sylmar resident Ariana Gonzalez's pit bulls, were playing with Lee Moss' Lhasa apso, Lucky Cinco.
"I came for the cause, and I won a doggy pillow at the Theresa's wheel," said Moss, of the San Fernando Valley.
A spin of the wheel, for $2 donated to the cancer society at sponsor Theresa's Country Feed and Pet, landed participants prizes including blankets, treats, and towels.
At an exhibit put on by On the Lamb Herding, Dot the border collie herded geese.
"There are about 60 different herding breeds," owner Robin Penland Elliott said. "It's a really good thing if your dog is bred to herd to let your dog go out and use their mind to actually herd animals. Frisbee and playing ball is great, but with herding they're actually getting to use their brain."
Cindi Hitt, of Simi Valley, was relaxing in a shady spot by a lake, getting ready to do the walk with her two dogs, Mick and Maddie. She had already done a 5-kilometer run Sunday.
"It's a gorgeous day here in Simi Valley," Hitt said. "You gotta do fun stuff here, and it's an important cause."
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Whenever a new tennis game hits the market, it seems that I'm always right there to greet it with open arms. I've never been a huge tennis fan, but the games always seem to hook me with their easy to master controls, non-confusing rule sets, and colorful graphics. Sega Superstars Tennis is no exception. Having played all of the Mario Tennis games to death, I was a little apprehensive about entering into the world of Sonic and Co. It's almost like cheating on your girlfriend that you never fought with. There's no reason to stray, you feel bad about it, but when all is said and done, you're glad you did it.
Sega Superstars Tennis takes the best aspects of the Sega world, mixes them all together, and creates a game that not only looks great, but is actually fun. The main modes of the game are split between what you've come to expect of the genre. Singles matches, doubles matches, tournaments, and multiplayer. Where SST expands on the modes is with the mini-games and aptly titled "Superstars" mode. Superstars mode is best described as quest-mode. The player chooses a stage that they'd like to conquer, and are then thrust into every single type of mini-game relating to the stage. Some stages only have singles tournaments, where others are full fledged mini-games which are unlocked after completing all tasks within the level. For example, to unlock the "Puyo Pop" mini-game in the main menu, you will have to work through the various things asked of you within Superstars mode. Whether that is clearing a whole screen of Puyos, or obtaining a high score, you'll always be working towards a reward. With over 100 levels, Superstars mode is where most people will spend the majority of their time.
If you are a Sega fan, there will be a ton of stuff for you to see within the game. Every level is crafted in pure Sega fashion, with Sega music, and cameos from all your favorite Sega stars. In total there are 16 playable characters ranging from Sonic to all the way to Alex Kidd. With the inclusion of the 16 characters, it would have been nice to see some of the more known Sega characters make an appearance. I mean, they could have used characters from Power Stone, Crazy Taxi, and Skies of Arcadia, but I suppose they'll be appearing in the followups. Along with the characters, fans are being treated to 10 stages based on some new, and old sega games. While some are great (Jet Set Radio), there are some that just aren't that fun to play on (Curien Mansion aka House of the Dead). The House of the Dead stage just doesn't fit with what I want in a tennis game - a colorful court that doesn't put me in a pissy mood. SST has a great variety of courts, but it would have been nice to have courts for all of the different games in the Superstars mode. For example, the Golden Axe stage is Curien Mansion, instead of being a full fledged Golden Axe level.
With a few exceptions in framerate, everything looks really great in Sega Superstars Tennis. Most of the courts are decorated with enough scenery to not make them look bland, and the character models look better than they ever have before. It's actually rather entertaining to see Gilius from Golden Axe in HD, beside Sega's new school line-up of Shadow, Ulala, and Pudding. One of the more annoying factors about the graphics is how the slowdown on some stages directly affects the gameplay. I really only encountered it on Dr. Eggman's stage, but it makes it frustrating enough to ruin the whole experience. There's nothing more annoying than trying to run across the court to hit a ball, than feeling like your stuck in framerate hell. The sound in SST is passable, but after a few hours of play you'll be finding yourself throwing on a custom playlist. There are tons of classic Sega tunes to unlock, but when that's all there is to listen to, it tends to get old pretty fast. Character voices, while done really well, get repetitive quickly. After every serve you'll hear the same thing over and over, and after a few games you'll want to turn them right off. All complaints aside, the sound is what many would expect of a classic Sega title. Quirky sounds and music that feel right at home with the Sega brand.
If you have ever played a Sega tennis game, you will know that they are the masters of the craft. You could hand the controls over to someone who has never played a tennis title, and in mere minutes they could be rallying with the best of them. All shots and swings are controlled with two buttons, while activating the special meter is set to the triggers. The actual gameplay flows smoothly, and often you'll find yourself not even thinking about your next move. The only confusing aspect of the controls is how they binded the lob and drop shots to a button combo, rather than a single button. I was about 6 hours into the game before I even realized that I could drop a shot close to the net, or lob a shot over my opponents head. In my opinion, it would have made much more sense to bind them to the two unused buttons. All in all, It's nice to see a company focus more on the controls aspect than anything else.
One of the more annoying features about SST is the online multiplayer. While it ran decently, there still are some lag issues that need to be fixed. The ball almost appears to stick to player's racquets, making it very difficult to time a return. There also really isn't a way to set up some good games, because there never really seems to be anyone playing. I spent about 2 hours one evening, and I think I managed to find about 8 games. I'm not sure why the online is empty, but hopefully now that the price has dropped on the game more people will check out some online games.
While Sega Superstars isn't a perfect game, that doesn't mean that it's not worth checking out. It's easy to pick up and play, and a great way to get your non-gaming girlfriend into gaming. Doubles games will provide hours of entertainment among friends, and the Superstars mode will satisfy any single player gaming sessions. With a brand new price point, it's probably one of the best titles you can get for $20.
Kim Fidler


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Should a Christian Use Hypnosis?
This is a hotly disputed issue with so many opinions on this subject. One of the reasons is that the word "hypnosis" or "hypnotism" is not mentioned once in the Word of God. However, for a Christian, the Bible is the yardstick by which any matter should be judged, and we should look for principles that apply in this case.
The Free Dictionary online gives this definition of hypnosis:
"The induction of a state of consciousness in which a person apparently loses the power of voluntary action and is highly responsive to suggestion or direction. Its use in therapy, typically to recover suppressed memories or to allow modification of behaviour, has been revived but is still controversial."
Another online definition, from http://www.compellingtruth.org/Christian-hypnosis.html, is as follows:
"Hypnosis is a process by which critical thinking is diminished and internal visualization is greatly heightened. It has been used to decrease the sensation of pain and the desire for an addiction, as well as the subconscious reaction that leads to fear. It's also been used in entertainment to temporarily convince people of things that aren't true. There are different types. There has been talk among Christians that hypnosis may open the mind to demonic influence. We don't know…