Exploring Exploratory Querying

Summary: Argues that query formulation is an exploratory, iterative design-debug-maintain cycle, supported by an empirical analysis of Wikidata Query Service logs that exposes common iterative modification patterns. Contributes a curated query-session dataset, a taxonomy of patterns, and a research roadmap for languages, engines, interfaces, and user studies to enable system-level support for exploratory querying. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 14218
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2025
Pagerank: 4.1905499e-05
Overall Rank: 10,864 | 24.50%
DOI: 10.14778/3773731.3773746

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Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

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Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 26 of 26 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
71	How Good Are Query Optimizers, Really?	2016	VLDB	0.00059446482
469	On Saying "Enough Already!" in SQL	1997	SIGMOD	0.00022397468
657	An Analytical Study of Large SPARQL Query Logs	2018	VLDB	0.00018581389
992	Effortless Data Exploration with zenvisage: An Expressive and Interactive Visual Analytics System	2017	VLDB	0.00014795333
1,270	Schema Summarization	2006	VLDB	0.00012911456
1,354	Northstar: An Interactive Data Science System	2018	VLDB	0.00012424105
1,507	Overview of Data Exploration Techniques	2015	SIGMOD	0.00011594294
1,874	Relations with Relation Names as Arguments: Algebra and Calculus	1992	PODS	0.00010251818
2,126	IDEBench: A Benchmark for Interactive Data Exploration	2020	SIGMOD	9.4814404e-05
3,003	Chorus: Foundation Models for Unified Data Discovery and Exploration	2024	VLDB	7.7358219e-05
5,011	SQL Has Problems. We Can Fix Them: Pipe Syntax In SQL	2024	VLDB	5.7544221e-05
5,144	Scalable Query Rewriting: A Graph-Based Approach	2011	SIGMOD	5.6597671e-05
5,459	QueryVis: Logic-based Diagrams help Users Understand Complicated SQL Queries Faster	2020	SIGMOD	5.4946579e-05
5,799	Learned Approximate Query Processing: Make it Light, Accurate and Fast	2021	CIDR	5.3219666e-05
7,250	DiscoPG: Property Graph Schema Discovery and Exploration	2022	VLDB	4.7839965e-05
7,281	AutoG: A Visual Query Autocompletion Framework for Graph Databases	2016	VLDB	4.7716651e-05
7,576	Reducing Ambiguity in Json Schema Discovery	2021	SIGMOD	4.7030704e-05
8,211	I-Rex: An Interactive Relational Query Explainer for SQL	2020	VLDB	4.5536424e-05
8,400	On The Reasonable Effectiveness of Relational Diagrams: Explaining Relational Query Patterns and the Pattern Expressiveness of Relational Languages	2024	SIGMOD	4.5180771e-05
8,686	gCore: Exploring Cross-layer Cohesiveness in Multi-layer Graphs	2023	VLDB	4.4623723e-05
8,837	Cache Me If You Can: Accuracy-Aware Inference Engine for Differentially Private Data Exploration	2023	VLDB	4.4350633e-05
8,850	Efficient Approximations of Conjunctive Queries	2012	PODS	4.4324268e-05
8,964	Reservoir Sampling over Joins	2024	SIGMOD	4.4163852e-05
9,222	Intelligent Agents for Data Exploration	2024	VLDB	4.366098e-05
9,749	ReCG: Bottom-Up JSON Schema Discovery Using a Repetitive Cluster-and-Generalize Framework	2024	VLDB	4.2856385e-05
9,801	Threshold Queries in Theory and in the Wild	2022	VLDB	4.2777144e-05

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3,330	Schemaless and Structureless Graph Querying	2014	VLDB	7.2116683e-05
381	Querying Database Knowledge	1990	SIGMOD	0.00024892227
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12,032	Mirror mirror on the wall, which query's fairest of them all?	2013	CIDR	4.1905499e-05
657	An Analytical Study of Large SPARQL Query Logs	2018	VLDB	0.00018581389
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9,366	IQ: The Case for Iterative Querying for Knowledge	2011	CIDR	4.3467888e-05