Pushing quality of service information and requirements into global query optimization

In recent years, a lot of research effort has been dedicated to the management of quality of service (QoS), mainly in the fields of telecommunication networks and multimedia systems. Emerging applications such as electronic commerce, health-care applications, digital publishing or data mining also have requirements regarding the quality of service, the cost of service, the quality of data to be delivered, the accuracy and precision of the retrieved data. These examples show the need to consider the concept of QoS from a broader perspective, requiring the collaboration of all the distributed system components involved. In this paper, we propose an approach to integrate user-defined QoS requirements, together with the dynamic properties of the system components involved, into a distributed query processing environment. We then propose a query optimization strategy in which multiple goals may be considered with separate cost models. Furthermore, we discuss some experiment results confirming the effectiveness of our approach.