DICE: Data Discovery by Example

Summary: DICE enables schema-agnostic data discovery from a handful of example records rather than SQL queries. It synthesizes candidate SQL over data-lake join paths and iteratively uses user validation to eliminate spurious results and refine intent. (summarized by gpt-5.6-luna on Jul 24 2026)

Paper ID: 12670
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2021
Pagerank: 5.7056625e-05
Overall Rank: 7,093 | 51.34%
DOI: 10.14778/3476311.3476353

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. El Kindi Rezig (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
2. Anshul Bhandari (National Institute of Technology Hamirpur)
3. Anna Fariha (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
4. Benjamin Price (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
5. Allan Vanterpool (United States Air Force)
6. Vijay Gadepally (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
7. Michael Stonebraker (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

BibTeX Citation

@article{rezig_vldb21,
        title = {{DICE: Data Discovery by Example}},
        author = {Rezig, El Kindi and Bhandari, Anshul and Fariha, Anna and Price, Benjamin and Vanterpool, Allan and Gadepally, Vijay and Stonebraker, Michael},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '21},
        volume = {14},
        number = {12},
        pages = {2819--2822},
        doi = {10.14778/3476311.3476353},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/3476311.3476353},
        year = {2021}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 7 of 7 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
9,020	Data-Driven Insight Synthesis for Multi-Dimensional Data	2024	VLDB	5.3306775e-05
9,973	Exploiting Structure in Regular Expression Queries	2023	SIGMOD	5.1845938e-05
10,080	Fainder: A Fast and Accurate Index for Distribution-Aware Dataset Search	2024	VLDB	5.158939e-05
10,486	Qualitative Join Discovery in Data Lakes using Examples	2026	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
11,055	Sort it Like You Mean It: Discovering Semantically Interesting Attribute Augmentations to Sort Tables	2025	VLDB	5.093636e-05
11,577	Fast Dataset Search with Earth Mover's Distance	2022	VLDB	5.093636e-05
13,404	Examples are All You Need: Iterative Data Discovery by Example in Data Lakes	2022	CIDR	-

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 7 of 7 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
963	The Data Civilizer System	2017	CIDR	0.00012935145
1,192	Query From Examples: An Iterative, Data-Driven Approach to Query Construction	2015	VLDB	0.00011740132
1,262	Discovering Queries based on Example Tuples	2014	SIGMOD	0.00011427456
2,048	Duoquest: A Dual-Specification System for Expressive SQL Queries	2020	SIGMOD	9.2560185e-05
2,387	S4: Top-k Spreadsheet-Style Search for Query Discovery	2015	SIGMOD	8.6482009e-05
3,677	Example-Driven Query Intent Discovery: Abductive Reasoning using Semantic Similarity	2019	VLDB	7.2076465e-05
5,404	Dagger: A Data (not code) Debugger	2020	CIDR	6.2294192e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	1,303	Finding Related Tables in Data Lakes for Interactive Data Science	2020	SIGMOD
2	12,140	AIDE: An Automatic User Navigation System for Interactive Data Exploration	2015	VLDB
3	10,486	Qualitative Join Discovery in Data Lakes using Examples	2026	SIGMOD
4	4,196	Automatic Example Queries for Ad Hoc Databases	2011	SIGMOD
5	11,778	Interactively Discovering and Ranking Desired Tuples without Writing SQL Queries	2020	SIGMOD
6	1,192	Query From Examples: An Iterative, Data-Driven Approach to Query Construction	2015	VLDB
7	10,933	LakeVisage: Towards Scalable, Flexible and Interactive Visualization Recommendation for Data Discovery over Data Lakes	2025	VLDB
8	2,677	Explore-by-Example: An Automatic Query Steering Framework for Interactive Data Exploration	2014	SIGMOD
9	2,136	Combining User Interaction, Speculative Query Execution and Sampling in the DICE System	2014	VLDB
10	13,404	Examples are All You Need: Iterative Data Discovery by Example in Data Lakes	2022	CIDR