MeshSQL: The Query Language for Simulation Mesh Data
B. Lee
Department of Computer Science
University of Vermont
bslee@cs.uvm.edu
Ron Musick*
iKuni, Inc
Palo Alto, CA 94304
musick@ikuni.com
Abstract
Mesh data has been a common form of data produced and searched in
scientific simulations, and has been growing rapidly in the size
thanks to the increasing computing power. Today, there are
visualization tools that assist scientists to explore and examine the
data, but their query capabilities are limited to a small set of fixed
visualization operations, which is far too short to meet the needs of
most users. Thus, it is imperative to provide ad hoc query tools for
them.
In this paper, we propose an ad hoc query language MeshSQL, which has
been extended from ANSI SQL99 to support the features unique to
simulation mesh data, such as temporality, spatial regions,
statistics, and similarity. After classifying MeshSQL queries based on
three criteria related to efficient implementations of the queries, we
present the syntax and semantics of MeshSQL, and support them with
examples. We also discuss implementing MeshSQL queries in SQL99 in an
object-relational database system that allows incorporating
user-defined types and functions. To our knowledge, MeshSQL is the
first and the only query language for simulation mesh data.
Appeared in
Information Sciences, Volume 159, Spring 2004
Look at the Paper (pdf.gz)
* Work done while author at
Center for Applied Scientific Computing
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
P.O. Box 808, L-561, Livermore, CA 94551