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A Formal Approach to Finding Explanations for Database Queries

Summary: Formal, intervention-based explanations for SQL query results, modeling how tuple deletions alter outputs under foreign-key interactions. Recursive rules compute interventions with polynomial data complexity; SQL-based top-K explanations under practical conditions, evaluated on real datasets. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID
4784
Venue
SIGMOD
Year
2014
Pagerank
0.00015479019
Overall Rank
648 | 95.50%
DOI
10.1145/2588555.2588578

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

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Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 50 of 67 citing papers.

Rank Citing Paper Year Venue Pagerank
1,766 MacroBase: Prioritizing Attention in Fast Data 2017 SIGMOD 9.882533e-05
2,118 DIFF: A Relational Interface for Large-Scale Data Explanation 2019 VLDB 9.2000813e-05
2,128 Explaining Query Answers with Explanation-Ready Databases 2016 VLDB 9.1839329e-05
2,154 Data Polygamy: The Many-Many Relationships among Urban Spatio-Temporal Data Sets 2016 SIGMOD 9.1315108e-05
2,342 Database Repairs and Consistent Query Answering: Origins and Further Developments 2019 PODS 8.7996173e-05
2,378 Causal Relational Learning 2020 SIGMOD 8.7404828e-05
2,551 Complaint-driven Training Data Debugging for Query 2.0 2020 SIGMOD 8.4919311e-05
2,696 Data X-Ray: A Diagnostic Tool for Data Errors 2015 SIGMOD 8.2965287e-05
2,858 SCODED: Statistical Constraint Oriented Data Error Detection 2020 SIGMOD 8.0943841e-05
3,896 The Complexity of Resilience and Responsibility for Self-Join-Free Conjunctive Queries 2016 VLDB 7.0981961e-05
4,526 Provenance for Natural Language Queries 2017 VLDB 6.7160041e-05
4,561 New Results for the Complexity of Resilience for Binary Conjunctive Queries with Self-Joins 2020 PODS 6.6958886e-05
4,562 Going Beyond Provenance: Explaining Query Answers with Pattern-based Counterbalances 2019 SIGMOD 6.6958473e-05
4,676 High-Level Why-Not Explanations using Ontologies 2015 PODS 6.6318284e-05
4,736 XInsight: eXplainable Data Analysis Through The Lens of Causality 2023 SIGMOD 6.6012363e-05
4,752 Efficient Answering of Historical What-if Queries 2022 SIGMOD 6.5976369e-05
4,892 QFix: Diagnosing Errors through Query Histories 2017 SIGMOD 6.5234004e-05
5,008 CAPE: Explaining Outliers by Counterbalancing 2019 VLDB 6.4715689e-05
5,052 Enabling SQL-based Training Data Debugging for Federated Learning 2022 VLDB 6.4521864e-05
5,225 Explainable AI: Foundations, Applications, Opportunities for Data Management Research 2022 SIGMOD 6.3782447e-05
5,279 Explaining Wrong Queries Using Small Examples 2019 SIGMOD 6.35884e-05
5,329 Putting Things into Context: Rich Explanations for Query Answers using Join Graphs 2021 SIGMOD 6.3311372e-05
5,855 Perturbation Analysis of Database Queries 2016 VLDB 6.1261788e-05
6,290 Approximate Summaries for Why and Why-not Provenance 2020 VLDB 5.9877161e-05
6,376 Explain3D: Explaining Disagreements in Disjoint Datasets 2019 VLDB 5.9606952e-05
6,484 Selective Provenance for Datalog Programs Using Top-K Queries 2015 VLDB 5.9237227e-05
6,510 Toward Interpretable and Actionable Data Analysis with Explanations and Causality 2022 VLDB 5.9130342e-05
6,545 On Multiple Semantics for Declarative Database Repairs 2020 SIGMOD 5.9036536e-05
6,768 Explaining Inference Queries with Bayesian Optimization 2021 VLDB 5.836255e-05
6,812 Summarized Causal Explanations For Aggregate Views 2024 SIGMOD 5.8250773e-05
7,101 A Unified Approach for Resilience and Causal Responsibility with Integer Linear Programming (ILP) and LP Relaxations 2023 SIGMOD 5.7557015e-05
7,258 ExplainED: Explanations for EDA Notebooks 2020 VLDB 5.7155992e-05
7,631 Video-zilla: An Indexing Layer for Large-Scale Video Analytics 2022 SIGMOD 5.6374007e-05
7,853 Interactive Query Explanations Using Fine Grained Provenance 2022 SIGMOD 5.6006765e-05
8,055 FEDEX: An Explainability Framework for Data Exploration Steps 2022 VLDB 5.5557054e-05
8,284 Hypothetical Reasoning via Provenance Abstraction 2019 SIGMOD 5.5158918e-05
8,621 Sommelier: Curating DNN Models for the Masses 2022 SIGMOD 5.4598872e-05
8,661 Aggregated Deletion Propagation for Counting Conjunctive Query Answers 2021 VLDB 5.4593674e-05
8,725 LensXPlain: Visualizing and Explaining Contributing Subsets for Aggregate Query Answers 2019 VLDB 5.4406663e-05
8,769 NLC: Search Correlated Window Pairs on Long Time Series 2022 VLDB 5.4320552e-05
8,772 Provenance-based Data Skipping 2022 VLDB 5.4314273e-05
8,864 Understanding Queries by Conditional Instances 2022 SIGMOD 5.4202259e-05
9,280 Equivalence-Invariant Algebraic Provenance for Hyperplane Update Queries 2020 SIGMOD 5.3557924e-05
9,565 TSExplain: Surfacing Evolving Explanations for Time Series 2021 SIGMOD 5.3160298e-05
9,629 Fair and Actionable Causal Prescription Ruleset 2025 SIGMOD 5.3018378e-05
9,712 CaJaDE: Explaining Query Results by Augmenting Provenance with Context 2022 VLDB 5.2859392e-05
9,759 DPXPlain: Privately Explaining Aggregate Query Answers 2023 VLDB 5.2759752e-05
9,845 Discovering Top-k Relevant and Diversified Rules 2024 SIGMOD 5.2617062e-05
9,847 Reptile: Aggregation-level Explanations for Hierarchical Data 2022 SIGMOD 5.2617062e-05
10,101 Privacy-preserving and Verifiable Causal Prescriptive Analytics 2026 SIGMOD 5.1725247e-05
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Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 10 of 10 cited papers.

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

Rank Cited Paper Year Venue Pagerank
187 Scorpion: Explaining Away Outliers in Aggregate Queries 2013 VLDB 0.00026500416
784 The Complexity of Causality and Responsibility for Query Answers and non-Answers 2011 VLDB 0.00014088837
895 Intelligent Rollups in Multidimensional OLAP Data 2001 VLDB 0.00013402064
1,563 Sensitivity Analysis and Explanations for Robust Query Evaluation in Probabilistic Databases 2011 SIGMOD 0.00010402446
1,596 Scalable Techniques for Mining Causal Structures 1998 VLDB 0.00010336866
1,663 PerfXplain: Debugging MapReduce Job Performance 2012 VLDB 0.00010148026
2,272 i3: Intelligent, Interactive Investigation of OLAP data cubes 2000 SIGMOD 8.9010392e-05
2,465 Tracing Data Errors with View-Conditioned Causality 2011 SIGMOD 8.6163802e-05
2,936 MRI: Meaningful Interpretations of Collaborative Ratings 2011 VLDB 8.0087016e-05
3,048 Explanation-Based Auditing 2012 VLDB 7.879832e-05
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Overall Rank Paper Year Venue Pagerank
1,895 Causality and Explanations in Databases 2014 VLDB 9.6219591e-05
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5,063 Facilitating SQL Query Composition and Analysis 2020 SIGMOD 6.4456357e-05
4,676 High-Level Why-Not Explanations using Ontologies 2015 PODS 6.6318284e-05
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6,768 Explaining Inference Queries with Bayesian Optimization 2021 VLDB 5.836255e-05
7,853 Interactive Query Explanations Using Fine Grained Provenance 2022 SIGMOD 5.6006765e-05
5,329 Putting Things into Context: Rich Explanations for Query Answers using Join Graphs 2021 SIGMOD 6.3311372e-05
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