Automatic Discovery of Attributes in Relational Databases

Summary: Data-driven clustering of relational columns to discover attributes, without external knowledge. Treats the database as a column-relationship graph and partitions it into connected components to form attribute clusters; experiments on real and synthetic data validate schema matching. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 4437
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2011
Pagerank: 7.3998323e-05
Overall Rank: 3,456 | 76.30%
DOI: 10.1145/1989323.1989336

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Meihui Zhang (National University of Singapore)
2. Marios Hadjieleftheriou (AT&T)
3. Beng Chin Ooi (National University of Singapore)
4. Cecilia M. Procopiuc (AT&T)
5. Divesh Srivastava (AT&T)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{zhang_sigmod11,
        title = {{Automatic Discovery of Attributes in Relational Databases}},
        author = {Zhang, Meihui and Hadjieleftheriou, Marios and Ooi, Beng Chin and Procopiuc, Cecilia M. and Srivastava, Divesh},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '11},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/1989323.1989336},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1989323.1989336},
        year = {2011}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 11 of 11 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,923	Annotating Columns with Pre-trained Language Models	2022	SIGMOD	9.4789109e-05
2,631	FastQRE: Fast Query Reverse Engineering	2018	SIGMOD	8.3231158e-05
4,123	Integrating Data Lake Tables	2023	VLDB	6.8878137e-05
5,099	Fast Foreign-Key Detection in Microsoft SQL Server PowerPivot for Excel	2014	VLDB	6.3646928e-05
5,293	Magneto: Combining Small and Large Language Models for Schema Matching	2025	VLDB	6.279939e-05
8,491	Synthesizing Mapping Relationships Using Table Corpus	2017	SIGMOD	5.414689e-05
10,897	OpenForge: Probabilistic Metadata Integration	2025	VLDB	5.093636e-05
10,987	OmniMatch: Joinability Discovery in Data Products	2025	VLDB	5.093636e-05
11,406	Steered Training Data Generation for Learned Semantic Type Detection	2023	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
11,430	VersaMatch: Ontology Matching with Weak Supervision	2023	VLDB	5.093636e-05
11,980	Building Structured Databases of Factual Knowledge from Massive Text Corpora	2017	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05

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
21	Similarity Search in High Dimensions via Hashing	1999	VLDB	0.00056760516
297	Generic Schema Matching with Cupid	2001	VLDB	0.00022157284
390	COMA - A system for flexible combination of schema matching approaches	2002	VLDB	0.00019382486
454	Using Schema Matching to Simplify Heterogeneous Data Translation	1998	VLDB	0.00018133578
808	On Schema Matching with Opaque Column Names and Data Values	2003	SIGMOD	0.00013884332
1,521	On Multi-Column Foreign Key Discovery	2010	VLDB	0.00010506299
1,723	Rondo: A Programming Platform for Generic Model Management	2003	SIGMOD	9.9204974e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	3,942	On the Complexity of Deriving Schema Mappings from Database Instances	2008	PODS
2	2,124	Improving Database Schemes by Adding Attributes	1983	PODS
3	11,144	Improved Approximation Algorithms for Relational Clustering	2024	PODS
4	3,222	Comprehensive Approach to the Design of Relational Database Schemes	1984	VLDB
5	1,521	On Multi-Column Foreign Key Discovery	2010	VLDB
6	3,572	Summary Graphs for Relational Database Schemas	2011	VLDB
7	808	On Schema Matching with Opaque Column Names and Data Values	2003	SIGMOD
8	2,854	Extracting and Analyzing Hidden Graphs from Relational Databases	2017	SIGMOD
9	1,532	Summarizing Relational Databases	2009	VLDB
10	349	Knowledge Discovery in Databases: An Attribute-Oriented Approach	1992	VLDB