Tiresias: The Database Oracle for How-To Queries

Summary: First system for how-to queries (reverse data management): TiQL-to-MIP translation yields SQL-generated variables and constraints on an RDBMS. It adds data-aware optimizations and divide-and-conquer MIP decomposition, delivering strong TPC-H performance. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 4597
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2012
Pagerank: 0.00012189583
Overall Rank: 1,096 | 92.49%
DOI: 10.1145/2213836.2213875

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Alexandra Meliou (University of Washington)
2. Dan Suciu (University of Washington)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{meliou_sigmod12,
        title = {{Tiresias: The Database Oracle for How-To Queries}},
        author = {Meliou, Alexandra and Suciu, Dan},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '12},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/2213836.2213875},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2213836.2213875},
        year = {2012}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 33 of 33 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
490	Design and Implementation of the LogicBlox System	2015	SIGMOD	0.000175757
2,142	Messing Up with BART: Error Generation for Evaluating Data-Cleaning Algorithms	2016	VLDB	9.0975882e-05
2,374	Causal Relational Learning	2020	SIGMOD	8.6755064e-05
2,584	Complaint-driven Training Data Debugging for Query 2.0	2020	SIGMOD	8.3783546e-05
2,807	Data Provenance at Internet Scale: Architecture, Experiences, and the Road Ahead	2017	CIDR	8.1009158e-05
3,214	Searchlight: Enabling Integrated Search and Exploration over Large Multidimensional Data	2015	VLDB	7.6325181e-05
4,638	Going Beyond Provenance: Explaining Query Answers with Pattern-based Counterbalances	2019	SIGMOD	6.5919801e-05
4,805	Efficient Answering of Historical What-if Queries	2022	SIGMOD	6.5003306e-05
4,959	QFix: Diagnosing Errors through Query Histories	2017	SIGMOD	6.4283324e-05
5,025	HYPER: Hypothetical Reasoning With What-If and How-To Queries Using a Probabilistic Causal Approach	2022	SIGMOD	6.3974766e-05
5,107	Stage: Query Execution Time Prediction in Amazon Redshift	2024	SIGMOD	6.3623786e-05
5,131	Enabling SQL-based Training Data Debugging for Federated Learning	2022	VLDB	6.3537809e-05
5,278	Why Not Yet: Fixing a Top-k Ranking that Is Not Fair to Individuals	2023	VLDB	6.2856584e-05
5,574	Lineage-driven Fault Injection	2015	SIGMOD	6.1681803e-05
6,389	Query Refinement for Diverse Top-k Selection	2024	SIGMOD	5.8895166e-05
6,576	Toward Interpretable and Actionable Data Analysis with Explanations and Causality	2022	VLDB	5.8364729e-05
6,587	Selective Provenance for Datalog Programs Using Top-K Queries	2015	VLDB	5.8333865e-05
6,638	Tiresias: A Demonstration of How-To Queries	2012	SIGMOD	5.8168173e-05
6,725	Quantum Databases	2013	CIDR	5.7921261e-05
6,853	Scalable Package Queries in Relational Database Systems	2016	VLDB	5.7540003e-05
7,269	A Unified Approach for Resilience and Causal Responsibility with Integer Linear Programming (ILP) and LP Relaxations	2023	SIGMOD	5.6595955e-05
8,002	Fast and Reliable Missing Data Contingency Analysis with Predicate-Constraints	2020	SIGMOD	5.5085906e-05
8,509	Hypothetical Reasoning via Provenance Abstraction	2019	SIGMOD	5.4120069e-05
8,598	Is Integer Linear Programming All You Need for Deletion Propagation? A Unified and Practical Approach for Generalized Deletion Propagation	2025	VLDB	5.4049137e-05
8,700	Aggregated Deletion Propagation for Counting Conjunctive Query Answers	2021	VLDB	5.3829336e-05
8,859	Complaint-Driven Training Data Debugging at Interactive Speeds	2022	SIGMOD	5.356561e-05
9,221	PackageBuilder: From Tuples to Packages	2014	VLDB	5.3039758e-05
9,416	Equivalence-Invariant Algebraic Provenance for Hyperplane Update Queries	2020	SIGMOD	5.2742007e-05
10,576	Efficient Query Repair for Aggregate Constraints	2026	VLDB	5.093636e-05
10,680	Ultraverse: An Efficient What-if Analysis Framework for Software Applications Interacting with Database Systems	2025	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
11,960	Constraint-based Explanation and Repair of Filter-based Transformations	2018	VLDB	5.093636e-05
12,212	A Provenance Framework for Data-Dependent Process Analysis	2014	VLDB	5.093636e-05
13,607	PackageBuilder: Querying for packages of tuples	2014	SIGMOD	-

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 8 of 8 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
17	Provenance Semirings	2007	PODS	0.00059843817
238	MCDB: A Monte Carlo Approach to Managing Uncertain Data	2008	SIGMOD	0.0002369322
331	Trio: A System for Data, Uncertainty, and Lineage	2006	VLDB	0.00020936658
806	Provenance for Aggregate Queries	2011	PODS	0.00013890398
2,369	Data Generation using Declarative Constraints	2011	SIGMOD	8.682429e-05
2,514	From Complete to Incomplete Information and Back	2007	SIGMOD	8.4818577e-05
2,914	Reverse Data Management	2011	VLDB	7.9667467e-05
3,390	Relational Lenses: A Language for Updatable Views	2006	PODS	7.4518363e-05

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2	4,369	Semantic Query Optimization in the Presence of Types	2010	PODS
3	8,007	Complete Approximations of Incomplete Queries	2013	VLDB
4	10,702	A Query-Aware Enormous Database Generator For System Performance Evaluation	2025	SIGMOD
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