Provenance for SQL through Abstract Interpretation: Value-less, but Worthwhile

Summary: Derives fine-grained where-/why-provenance for rich SQL—including recursion, correlated subqueries, windows, and aggregation—via program slicing and abstract interpretation. A two-stage, largely value-less analysis records control flow/accesses, then computes dependencies without inspecting data. (summarized by gpt-5.6-luna on Jul 24 2026)

Paper ID: 11258
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2015
Pagerank: 5.3002223e-05
Overall Rank: 9,241 | 36.60%
DOI: 10.14778/2824032.2824089

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Tobias Müller (University of Tübingen)
2. Torsten Grust (University of Tübingen)

BibTeX Citation

@article{muller_vldb15,
        title = {{Provenance for SQL through Abstract Interpretation: Value-less, but Worthwhile}},
        author = {Müller, Tobias and Grust, Torsten},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '15},
        volume = {8},
        number = {12},
        doi = {10.14778/2824032.2824089},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/2824032.2824089},
        year = {2015}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 2 of 2 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
4,602	Provenance for Natural Language Queries	2017	VLDB	6.6107638e-05
8,145	You Say ‘What’, I Hear ‘Where’ and ‘Why’ — (Mis-)Interpreting SQL to Derive Fine-Grained Provenance	2018	VLDB	5.4790624e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 2 of 2 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
23	Efficiently Compiling Efficient Query Plans for Modern Hardware	2011	VLDB	0.00054886415
534	Building Efficient Query Engines in a High-Level Language	2014	VLDB	0.00017046514

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3	5,396	Putting Things into Context: Rich Explanations for Query Answers using Join Graphs	2021	SIGMOD
4	7,977	Interactive Query Explanations Using Fine Grained Provenance	2022	SIGMOD
5	1,912	Querying Data Provenance	2010	SIGMOD
6	4,602	Provenance for Natural Language Queries	2017	VLDB
7	6,358	On Provenance Minimization	2011	PODS
8	6,351	Tracing Lineage Beyond Relational Operators	2007	VLDB
9	806	Provenance for Aggregate Queries	2011	PODS
10	8,145	You Say ‘What’, I Hear ‘Where’ and ‘Why’ — (Mis-)Interpreting SQL to Derive Fine-Grained Provenance	2018	VLDB