Handling Uncertainty in Database: An Introduction and Brief Survey

Abstract

In the last years, uncertainty management became an important aspect as the presence of uncertain data increased rapidly. Due to the several advanced technologies that have been developed to record large quantity of data continuously, resulting is a data that contain errors or may be partially complete. Instead of dealing with data uncertainty by removing it, we must deal with it as a source of information. To deal with this data, database management system should have special features to handle uncertain data.  The aim of this paper is twofold: on one hand, we describe some key concepts of uncertainty in database. Then we discuss different techniques for managing uncertain data such as join processing, query selection, and indexing of uncertain data. We also provide a survey of the database management systems dealing with uncertain data, presenting their features and comparing them.