Query integration for refreshing web views

Abstract

As websites grow larger and become more sophisticated, organizations use structured database systems as a source of base data for information presented on the website. Thus, it has become critical to keep a very large website up-to-date in response to frequent changes to base data. This is particularly true for websites presenting fast changing information. The execution of a refresh query produces a Web view that forms the content of a portion of a Web page. As the execution of such queries involve database access, the execution time may affect the feasibility of timely refreshing a set of Web views contained in a website. In this paper, we focus on the problem of reducing database access and improving the feasibility of scheduling a set of refresh queries to timely refresh Web views. We propose an optimization technique, query integration to reduce the number of potential refresh queries. The technique seeks to integrate compatible queries into a single query. We illustrate the efficiency of this technique with empirical results. © 2001 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.