Example-Driven User Intent Discovery: Empowering Users to Cross the SQL Barrier Through Query by Example

12/29/2020
by   Anna Fariha, et al.
0

Traditional data systems require specialized technical skills where users need to understand the data organization and write precise queries to access data. Therefore, novice users who lack technical expertise face hurdles in perusing and analyzing data. Existing tools assist in formulating queries through keyword search, query recommendation, and query auto-completion, but still require some technical expertise. An alternative method for accessing data is Query by Example (QBE), where users express their data exploration intent simply by providing examples of their intended data. We study a state-of-the-art QBE system called SQuID, and contrast it with traditional SQL querying. Our comparative user studies demonstrate that users with varying expertise are significantly more effective and efficient with SQuID than SQL. We find that SQuID eliminates the barriers in studying the database schema, formalizing task semantics, and writing syntactically correct SQL queries, and thus, substantially alleviates the need for technical expertise in data exploration.

READ FULL TEXT

page 9

page 15

research
06/25/2019

Example-Driven Query Intent Discovery: Abductive Reasoning using Semantic Similarity

Traditional relational data interfaces require precise structured querie...
research
03/16/2020

Duoquest: A Dual-Specification System for Expressive SQL Queries

Querying a relational database is difficult because it requires users to...
research
03/09/2022

CUBES: A Parallel Synthesizer for SQL Using Examples

In recent years, more and more people see their work depend on data mani...
research
05/14/2023

QueryBooster: Improving SQL Performance Using Middleware Services for Human-Centered Query Rewriting

SQL query performance is critical in database applications, and query re...
research
12/07/2022

You Don't Know Search: Helping Users Find Code by Automatically Evaluating Alternative Queries

Tens of thousands of engineers use Sourcegraph day-to-day to search for ...
research
08/01/2017

A Survey on Visual Query Systems in the Web Era (extended version)

As more and more collections of data are becoming available on the web t...
research
05/29/2018

Sapphire: Querying RDF Data Made Simple

RDF data in the linked open data (LOD) cloud is very valuable for many d...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset