The Schema-Independent Database UI: A Proposed Holy Grail and Some Suggestions

Summary: Proposes a schema-independent graphical UI to let non-experts create, manage, and query relational databases with spreadsheet-like ease, replacing bespoke schema-dependent front ends. Sketches research directions for visual query languages and UI abstractions to bridge spreadsheets and RDBMS. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 164
Venue: CIDR
Year: 2011
Pagerank: 5.093636e-05
Overall Rank: 12,359 | 15.21%
DOI: -

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

No non-self incoming citations found for this paper in this database.

Authors

1. Eirik Bakke (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
2. Edward Benson (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{bakke_cidr11,
        address = {Amsterdam, Netherlands},
        series = {{CIDR} '11},
        title = {{The Schema-Independent Database UI: A Proposed Holy Grail and Some Suggestions}},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {Conference} on {Innovative} {Data} {Systems} {Research}},
        author = {Bakke, Eirik and Benson, Edward},
        year = {2011}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 1 of 1 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
4,046	Expressive Query Construction through Direct Manipulation of Nested Relational Results	2016	SIGMOD	6.9392871e-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
3,982	WYSIWYG Development of Data Driven Web Applications	2008	VLDB	6.9745342e-05
6,096	Do-It-Yourself Database-Driven Web Applications	2009	CIDR	5.9781721e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	4,606	Updating a Relational Database through a Universal Schema Interface	1985	PODS
2	6,627	Schema-free SQL	2014	SIGMOD
3	14,326	User Interfaces; Who Cares?	1994	VLDB
4	14,456	PANEL: User Interfaces and Database Management Systems	1986	SIGMOD
5	8,300	Dynamic Derivation of Personalized Views	1988	VLDB
6	1,558	SchemaSQL - A Language for Interoperability in Relational Multi-database Systems	1996	VLDB
7	7,485	Database Usability	1983	SIGMOD
8	314	Making Database Systems Usable	2007	SIGMOD
9	8,174	Databases will Visualize Queries too	2011	VLDB
10	4,046	Expressive Query Construction through Direct Manipulation of Nested Relational Results	2016	SIGMOD