Explaining Missing Answers to SPJUA Queries

Summary: Missing-answer explanations for SPJUA queries via a source-data-driven framework; algorithms yield correct, finite, and, when possible, minimal explanation sets. Artemis implements this approach for query debugging; experiments show explanations produced quickly enough for practical developer use. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 10075
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2010
Pagerank: 8.5386194e-05
Overall Rank: 2,562 | 82.18%
DOI: -

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Melanie Herschel
2. Mauricio A. Hernández

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 20 of 20 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
2,602	Tracing Data Errors with View-Conditioned Causality	2011	SIGMOD	8.4667197e-05
2,638	Messing Up with BART: Error Generation for Evaluating Data-Cleaning Algorithms	2016	VLDB	8.399764e-05
2,797	Query-Oriented Data Cleaning with Oracles	2015	SIGMOD	8.1108589e-05
2,892	Data Provenance at Internet Scale: Architecture, Experiences, and the Road Ahead	2017	CIDR	7.9480559e-05
3,095	Answering Why-not Questions on Reverse Top-k Queries	2015	VLDB	7.5692859e-05
4,361	The Complexity of Resilience and Responsibility for Self-Join-Free Conjunctive Queries	2016	VLDB	6.2559141e-05
4,937	New Results for the Complexity of Resilience for Binary Conjunctive Queries with Self-Joins	2020	PODS	5.8187108e-05
5,191	Going Beyond Provenance: Explaining Query Answers with Pattern-based Counterbalances	2019	SIGMOD	5.6378768e-05
5,660	Descriptive and Prescriptive Data Cleaning	2014	SIGMOD	5.3847321e-05
5,733	Explaining Wrong Queries Using Small Examples	2019	SIGMOD	5.3483446e-05
5,826	Why Not Yet: Fixing a Top-k Ranking that Is Not Fair to Individuals	2023	VLDB	5.3124507e-05
6,534	Automatic Rule Refinement for Information Extraction	2010	VLDB	5.0244622e-05
6,573	EFQ: Why-Not Answer Polynomials in Action	2015	VLDB	5.0058435e-05
6,696	Approximate Summaries for Why and Why-not Provenance	2020	VLDB	4.9581958e-05
8,149	Why Not Match: On Explanations of Event Pattern Queries	2021	SIGMOD	4.5752863e-05
8,954	Understanding Queries by Conditional Instances	2022	SIGMOD	4.4221863e-05
9,766	DPXPlain: Privately Explaining Aggregate Query Answers	2023	VLDB	4.2856106e-05
10,359	Smallest Synthetic Witnesses for Conjunctive Queries	2025	PODS	4.1945683e-05
11,592	SPARQL Rewriting: Towards Desired Results	2020	SIGMOD	4.1945683e-05
11,733	Provenance Summaries for Answers and Non-Answers	2018	VLDB	4.1945683e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 6 of 6 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
55	Efficiently Updating Materialized Views	1986	SIGMOD	0.00065762967
487	Why Not?	2009	SIGMOD	0.00022050218
494	Data Exchange: Getting to the Core	2003	PODS	0.00021805832
652	On the Provenance of Non-Answers to Queries over Extracted Data	2008	VLDB	0.00018634477
2,790	Artemis: A System for Analyzing Missing Answers	2009	VLDB	8.1239026e-05
4,405	On Preservation under Homomorphisms and Unions of Conjunctive Queries	2004	PODS	6.2156238e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
5,733	Explaining Wrong Queries Using Small Examples	2019	SIGMOD	5.3483446e-05
652	On the Provenance of Non-Answers to Queries over Extracted Data	2008	VLDB	0.00018634477
7,358	Weighted Distinct Sampling: Cardinality Estimation for SPJ Queries	2021	SIGMOD	4.7529363e-05
942	A Formal Approach to Finding Explanations for Database Queries	2014	SIGMOD	0.00015155714
4,636	Reverse Engineering SPJ-Queries from Examples	2017	PODS	6.0303761e-05
5,691	Putting Things into Context: Rich Explanations for Query Answers using Join Graphs	2021	SIGMOD	5.3684557e-05
1,509	Discovering Queries based on Example Tuples	2014	SIGMOD	0.00011612727
7,678	To Not Miss the Forest for the Trees - A Holistic Approach for Explaining Missing Answers over Nested Data	2021	SIGMOD	4.6813062e-05
1,125	How to ConQueR Why-Not Questions	2010	SIGMOD	0.00013845652
2,790	Artemis: A System for Analyzing Missing Answers	2009	VLDB	8.1239026e-05