A Case for A Collaborative Query Management System

Over the past 40 years, database management systems (DBMSs) have evolved to provide a sophisticated variety of data management capabilities. At the same time, tools for managing queries over the data have remained relatively primitive. One reason for this is that queries are typically issued through applications. They are thus debugged once and re-used repeatedly. This mode of interaction, however, is changing. As scientists (and others) store and share increasingly large volumes of data in data centers, they need the ability to analyze the data by issuing exploratory queries. In this paper, we argue that, in these new settings, data management systems must provide powerful query management capabilities, from query browsing to automatic query recommendations. We first discuss the requirements for a collaborative query management system. We outline an early system architecture and discuss the many research challenges associated with building such an engine.