Bridging Theory and Practice with Query Log Analysis

Since large structured query logs have recently become available, we have a new opportunity to gain insights in the types of queries that users ask. Even though such logs can be quite volatile, there are various new observations that can be made about the structure of queries inside them, on which we report here. Furthermore, building on an extensive analysis that has been done on such logs, we were able to provide a theoretical explanation why regular path queries in graph database applications behave better than worst-case complexity results suggest at first sight.