Robust query processing: mission possible

Robust query processing with strong performance guarantees is an extremely desirable objective in the design of industrial-strength database engines. However, it has proved to be a largely intractable and elusive challenge in spite of sustained efforts spanning several decades. The good news is that in recent times, there have been a host of exciting technical advances, at different levels in the database architecture, that collectively promise to materially address this problem. In this tutorial, we will present these novel research approaches, characterize their strengths and limitations, and enumerate open technical problems that remain to be solved to make robust query processing a contemporary reality.