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: 10266
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2010
Pagerank: 9.2828822e-05
Overall Rank: 2,032 | 86.07%
DOI: 10.14778/1920841.1920869

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Melanie Herschel (University of Tübingen)
2. Mauricio A. Hernández (IBM)

BibTeX Citation

@article{herschel_vldb10,
        title = {{Explaining Missing Answers to SPJUA Queries}},
        author = {Herschel, Melanie and Hernández, Mauricio A.},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '10},
        volume = {3},
        number = {1},
        doi = {10.14778/1920841.1920869},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/1920841.1920869},
        year = {2010}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 20 of 20 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
2,142	Messing Up with BART: Error Generation for Evaluating Data-Cleaning Algorithms	2016	VLDB	9.0975882e-05
2,432	Tracing Data Errors with View-Conditioned Causality	2011	SIGMOD	8.5870067e-05
2,570	Query-Oriented Data Cleaning with Oracles	2015	SIGMOD	8.4061164e-05
2,807	Data Provenance at Internet Scale: Architecture, Experiences, and the Road Ahead	2017	CIDR	8.1009158e-05
2,895	Answering Why-not Questions on Reverse Top-k Queries	2015	VLDB	7.9829449e-05
3,991	The Complexity of Resilience and Responsibility for Self-Join-Free Conjunctive Queries	2016	VLDB	6.9695922e-05
4,638	Going Beyond Provenance: Explaining Query Answers with Pattern-based Counterbalances	2019	SIGMOD	6.5919801e-05
4,670	New Results for the Complexity of Resilience for Binary Conjunctive Queries with Self-Joins	2020	PODS	6.5734205e-05
4,752	Automatic Rule Refinement for Information Extraction	2010	VLDB	6.5235308e-05
4,759	Explaining Wrong Queries Using Small Examples	2019	SIGMOD	6.5207388e-05
4,890	Descriptive and Prescriptive Data Cleaning	2014	SIGMOD	6.4590072e-05
5,278	Why Not Yet: Fixing a Top-k Ranking that Is Not Fair to Individuals	2023	VLDB	6.2856584e-05
6,360	Approximate Summaries for Why and Why-not Provenance	2020	VLDB	5.9009081e-05
7,257	EFQ: Why-Not Answer Polynomials in Action	2015	VLDB	5.661841e-05
8,388	Why Not Match: On Explanations of Event Pattern Queries	2021	SIGMOD	5.4364073e-05
8,719	DPXPlain: Privately Explaining Aggregate Query Answers	2023	VLDB	5.3774243e-05
8,970	Understanding Queries by Conditional Instances	2022	SIGMOD	5.3422757e-05
10,652	Smallest Synthetic Witnesses for Conjunctive Queries	2025	PODS	5.093636e-05
11,787	SPARQL Rewriting: Towards Desired Results	2020	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
11,938	Provenance Summaries for Answers and Non-Answers	2018	VLDB	5.093636e-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
39	Efficiently Updating Materialized Views	1986	SIGMOD	0.00047309646
377	Data Exchange: Getting to the Core	2003	PODS	0.00019643793
385	Why Not?	2009	SIGMOD	0.00019455743
628	On the Provenance of Non-Answers to Queries over Extracted Data	2008	VLDB	0.00015630285
2,358	Artemis: A System for Analyzing Missing Answers	2009	VLDB	8.6996414e-05
4,184	On Preservation under Homomorphisms and Unions of Conjunctive Queries	2004	PODS	6.8464183e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	4,759	Explaining Wrong Queries Using Small Examples	2019	SIGMOD
2	628	On the Provenance of Non-Answers to Queries over Extracted Data	2008	VLDB
3	7,256	Weighted Distinct Sampling: Cardinality Estimation for SPJ Queries	2021	SIGMOD
4	663	A Formal Approach to Finding Explanations for Database Queries	2014	SIGMOD
5	4,644	Reverse Engineering SPJ-Queries from Examples	2017	PODS
6	5,396	Putting Things into Context: Rich Explanations for Query Answers using Join Graphs	2021	SIGMOD
7	1,262	Discovering Queries based on Example Tuples	2014	SIGMOD
8	7,748	To Not Miss the Forest for the Trees - A Holistic Approach for Explaining Missing Answers over Nested Data	2021	SIGMOD
9	856	How to ConQueR Why-Not Questions	2010	SIGMOD
10	2,358	Artemis: A System for Analyzing Missing Answers	2009	VLDB