Worst-case optimal join algorithms have so far been studied in two broad contexts -- $(1)$ when we are given input relation sizes [Atserias et al., FOCS 2008, Ngo et al., PODS 2012, Velduizhen et. al, ICDT 2014] $(2)$ when in addition to size, we are given a degree bound on the relation [Abo Khamis et al., PODS 2017]. To the best of our knowledge, this problem has not been studied beyond these two statistics even for the case when input relations have arity (at most) two. In this paper, we present a worst-case optimal join algorithm when are given $\ell_{p}$-norm size bounds on input relations of arity at most two for $p \in (1, 2]$. ($p=1$ corresponds to relation size bounds and $p=\infty$ corresponds to the degree bounds.) The worst-case optimality holds any fixed $p \in (2, \infty)$ as well (as long as the join query graph has large enough girth). Our algorithm is {\em simple}, does not depend on $p$ (or) the $\ell_{p}$-norm bounds and avoids the (large) poly-log factor associated with the best known algorithm PANDA [Abo Khamis et al., PODS 2017] for the size and degree bounds setting of the problem. In this process, we (partially) resolve two open question from [Ngo, 2018 Gems of PODS]. We believe our algorithm has the {\em potential} to pave the way for practical worst-case optimal join algorithms beyond the case of size bounds.

In this paper, we initiate a theoretical study of what we call the join covering problem. We are given a natural join query instance $Q$ on $n$ attributes and $m$ relations $(R_i)_{i \in [m]}$. Let $J_{Q} = \ \Join_{i=1}^m R_i$ denote the join output of $Q$. In addition to $Q$, we are given a parameter $\Delta: 1\le \Delta\le n$ and our goal is to compute the smallest subset $\mathcal{T}_{Q, \Delta} \subseteq J_{Q}$ such that every tuple in $J_{Q}$ is within Hamming distance $\Delta - 1$ from some tuple in $\mathcal{T}_{Q, \Delta}$. The join covering problem captures both computing the natural join from database theory and constructing a covering code with covering radius $\Delta - 1$ from coding theory, as special cases. We consider the combinatorial version of the join covering problem, where our goal is to determine the worst-case $|\mathcal{T}_{Q, \Delta}|$ in terms of the structure of $Q$ and value of $\Delta$. One obvious approach to upper bound $|\mathcal{T}_{Q, \Delta}|$ is to exploit a distance property (of Hamming distance) from coding theory and combine it with the worst-case bounds on output size of natural joins (AGM bound hereon) due to Atserias, Grohe and Marx [SIAM J. of Computing'13]. Somewhat surprisingly, this approach is not tight even for the case when the input relations have arity at most two. Instead, we show that using the polymatroid degree-based bound of Abo Khamis, Ngo and Suciu [PODS'17] in place of the AGM bound gives us a tight bound (up to constant factors) on the $|\mathcal{T}_{Q, \Delta}|$ for the arity two case. We prove lower bounds for $|\mathcal{T}_{Q, \Delta}|$ using well-known classes of error-correcting codes e.g, Reed-Solomon codes. We can extend our results for the arity two case to general arity with a polynomial gap between our upper and lower bounds.

In this paper, we prove topology dependent bounds on the number of rounds needed to compute Functional Aggregate Queries ($\FAQ$s) studied by Abo Khamis et al. [PODS 2016] in a synchronous distributed network under the model considered by Chattopadhyay et al. [FOCS 2014, SODA 2017]. Unlike the recent work on computing database queries in the Massively Parallel Computation model, in the model of Chattopadhyay et al., nodes can communicate only via private point-to-point channels and we are interested in bounds that work over an \em arbitrary communication topology. This model, which is closer to the well-studied $\congest$ model in distributed computing and generalizes Yao's two party communication complexity model, has so far only been studied for problems that are common in the two-party communication complexity literature. This is the first work to consider more practically motivated problems in this distributed model. For the sake of exposition, we focus on two specific problems in this paper: Boolean Conjunctive Query ($\BCQ$) and computing variable/factor marginals in Probabilistic Graphical Models (PGMs). We obtain tight bounds on the number of rounds needed to compute such queries as long as the underlying hypergraph of the query is $O(1)$-degenerate and has $O(1)$-arity. In particular, the $O(1)$-degeneracy condition covers most well-studied queries that are efficiently computable in the centralized computation model like queries with constant treewidth. These tight bounds depend on a new notion of 'width' (namely \em internal-node-width ) for Generalized Hypertree Decompositions (GHDs) of acyclic hypergraphs, which minimizes the number of internal nodes in a sub-class of GHDs. To the best of our knowledge, this width has not been studied explicitly in the theoretical database literature. Finally, we consider the problem of computing the product of a vector with a chain of matrices and prove tight bounds on its round complexity (over a finite field of two elements) using a novel min-entropy based argument.

We revisit the classical problem of exact inference on probabilistic graphical models (PGMs). Our algorithm is based on recent worst-case optimal database join algorithms, which can be asymptotically faster than traditional data processing methods. We present the first empirical evaluation of these new algorithms via JoinInfer, a new exact inference engine. We empirically explore the properties of the data for which our engine can be expected to outperform traditional inference engines refining current theoretical notions. Further, JoinInfer outperforms existing state-of-the-art inference engines (ACE, IJGP and libDAI) on some standard benchmark datasets by up to a factor of 630x. Finally, we propose a promising data-driven heuristic that extends JoinInfer to automatically tailor its parameters and/or switch to the traditional inference algorithms.

$\epsilon$-Minimum Storage Regenerating ($\epsilon$-MSR) codes form a special class of Maximum Distance Separable (MDS) codes, providing mechanisms for exact regeneration of a single code block in their codewords by downloading slighly sub-optimal amount of information from the remaining code blocks. The key advantage of these codes is a significantly lower sub-packetization that grows only logarithmically with the length of the code, while providing optimality in storage and error-correcting capacity. However, from an implementation point of view, these codes require each remaining code block to be available for the repair of any single code block. In this paper, we address this issue by constructing $\epsilon$-MSR codes that can repair a failed code block by contacting a fewer number of available code blocks. When a code block fails, our repair procedure needs to contact a few compulsory code blocks and is free to choose any subset of available code blocks for the remaining choices. Further, our construction requiresa field size linear in code length and ensures load balancing among the contacted code blocks in terms of information downloaded from them for a single repair.