Aqua is the first system to provide fast, highly-accurate approximate answers for a broad class of queries arising in data warehousing environments.
Aqua answers queries using precomputed synopses of the data.
Aqua provides answers in orders of magnitude less time than it takes to compute an exact answer. To avoid costly overheads, Aqua synopses are incrementally maintained in the presence of database updates. Besides the overall system architecture, the key to Aqua is the design and analysis of its synopses.