Automatic Example Queries for Ad Hoc Databases

Summary: Automatic generation of starter SQL queries over unstructured, schema-less table collections without logs or prior input. From public databases, learns operator-specific models and assembles queries piecewise; shows how dataset statistics shape feasible starter queries to bootstrap non-experts. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 4563
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2011
Pagerank: 6.8416684e-05
Overall Rank: 4,196 | 71.22%
DOI: 10.1145/1989323.1989487

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Bill Howe (University of Washington)
2. Garret Cole (University of Washington)
3. Nodira Khoussainova (University of Washington)
4. Leilani Battle (University of Washington)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{howe_sigmod11,
        title = {{Automatic Example Queries for Ad Hoc Databases}},
        author = {Howe, Bill and Cole, Garret and Khoussainova, Nodira and Battle, Leilani},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '11},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/1989323.1989487},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1989323.1989487},
        year = {2011}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 4 of 4 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,192	Query From Examples: An Iterative, Data-Driven Approach to Query Construction	2015	VLDB	0.00011740132
3,635	Changing the Face of Database Cloud Services with Personalized Service Level Agreements	2015	CIDR	7.2343405e-05
10,530	SQL-Exchange: Transforming SQL Queries Across Domains	2026	VLDB	5.093636e-05
11,661	PyExplore: Query Recommendations for Data Exploration without Query Logs	2021	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 5 of 5 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
297	Generic Schema Matching with Cupid	2001	VLDB	0.00022157284
493	Data Integration for the Relational Web	2009	VLDB	0.00017558709
762	Model Management 2.0: Manipulating Richer Mappings	2007	SIGMOD	0.00014231163
1,532	Summarizing Relational Databases	2009	VLDB	0.00010472227
2,905	SQL QueRIE Recommendations	2010	VLDB	7.9756156e-05

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