You Say 'What', I Hear 'Where' and 'Why' - (Mis-)Interpreting SQL to Derive Fine-Grained Provenance

Summary: Shows that SQL misinterpretations reveal cell-level provenance (where/why) for recursion, windowed aggregates, and UDFs. Proposes a rewrite that makes the query a provenance interpreter from data dependencies, preserving shape and enabling scalable provenance. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 11640
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2018
Pagerank: 4.5541444e-05
Overall Rank: 8,230 | 42.75%
DOI: 10.14778/3236187.3236204

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 3 of 3 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
6,295	Your notebook is not crumby enough, REPLace it	2020	CIDR	5.1249204e-05
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
8,886	Provenance-based Data Skipping	2022	VLDB	4.4279829e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 14 of 14 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
31	Provenance Semirings	2007	PODS	0.0007857786
66	Spark SQL: Relational Data Processing in Spark	2015	SIGMOD	0.00061639801
101	ULDBs: Databases with Uncertainty and Lineage	2006	VLDB	0.0004955674
140	The MADlib Analytics Library or MAD Skills, the SQL	2012	VLDB	0.00042270404
487	Why Not?	2009	SIGMOD	0.00022050218
611	Lineage Tracing for General Data Warehouse Transformations	2001	VLDB	0.00019231115
851	The case against specialized graph analytics engines	2015	CIDR	0.0001594441
1,048	Set Containment Joins: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly	2000	VLDB	0.00014457009
1,568	A Polygen Model for Heterogeneous Database Systems: The Source Tagging Perspective	1990	VLDB	0.00011323734
2,173	Querying Data Provenance	2010	SIGMOD	9.3676609e-05
5,209	Explaining Outputs in Modern Data Analytics	2016	VLDB	5.629362e-05
7,478	Debugging Transactions and Tracking their Provenance with Reenactment	2017	VLDB	4.7184026e-05
9,029	Provenance for SQL through Abstract Interpretation: Value-less, but Worthwhile	2015	VLDB	4.4040532e-05
9,225	Computational Reproducibility: State-of-the-Art, Challenges, and Database Research Opportunities	2012	SIGMOD	4.369407e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
8,125	The Complexity of Why-Provenance for Datalog Queries	2024	PODS	4.5797807e-05
4,851	Provenance for Natural Language Queries	2017	VLDB	5.8768322e-05
8,729	OneProvenance: Efficient Extraction of Dynamic Coarse-Grained Provenance From Database Query Event Logs	2023	VLDB	4.4582221e-05
7,556	Interactive Query Explanations Using Fine Grained Provenance	2022	SIGMOD	4.7117814e-05
5,843	Tracing Lineage Beyond Relational Operators	2007	VLDB	5.3032967e-05
5,691	Putting Things into Context: Rich Explanations for Query Answers using Join Graphs	2021	SIGMOD	5.3684557e-05
2,173	Querying Data Provenance	2010	SIGMOD	9.3676609e-05
6,186	On Provenance Minimization	2011	PODS	5.166082e-05
1,106	Provenance for Aggregate Queries	2011	PODS	0.0001398766
9,029	Provenance for SQL through Abstract Interpretation: Value-less, but Worthwhile	2015	VLDB	4.4040532e-05