Solid state disks (SSDs) provide much faster random access to data compared to conventional hard disk drives. Therefore, the response time of a database engine could be improved by moving the objects that are frequently accessed in a random fashion to ...

When gathering data from multiple data sources, users need uniform, transparent access to data. Also, when extracting data from several independent, often only partially sound and complete data sources, it is useful to present users with meta-...

The World Wide Web is a large, heterogeneous, distributed collection of documents connected by hypertext links. The most common technology currently used for searching the Web depends on sending information retrieval requests to “index servers”. One ...