Analysis of Database Search Systems with THOR

Abstract

Numerous search systems have been implemented that allow users to pose unstructured queries over databases without the need to use a query language, such as SQL. Unfortunately, the landscape of efforts is fragmented with no clear sight of which system is best, and what open challenges we should pursue in our research. To help towards this direction, we present THOR that makes 4 important contributions: a query benchmark, a framework for comparing different systems, several search system implementations, and a highly interactive tool for comparing different search systems.