Schema-free SQL

Summary: Introduce Schema-free SQL, a RDB query language enabling partial schema, tolerating unknown relation/attr names and missing join paths. A translator converts Schema-free SQL to full SQL; schema info yields results as if fully specified. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 4838
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2014
Pagerank: 5.8198662e-05
Overall Rank: 6,627 | 54.54%
DOI: 10.1145/2588555.2588571

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Fei Li (University of Michigan)
2. Tianyin Pan (University of Michigan)
3. H. V. Jagadish (University of Michigan)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{li_sigmod14,
        title = {{Schema-free SQL}},
        author = {Li, Fei and Pan, Tianyin and Jagadish, H. V.},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '14},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/2588555.2588571},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2588555.2588571},
        year = {2014}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 3 of 3 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
2,592	SQLShare: Results from a Multi-Year SQL-as-a-Service Experiment	2016	SIGMOD	8.3657526e-05
5,976	Interactive Browsing and Navigation in Relational Databases	2016	VLDB	6.0219844e-05
9,216	Management of Flexible Schema Data in RDBMSs - Opportunities and Limitations for NoSQL	2015	CIDR	5.3051647e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 9 of 9 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
37	DISCOVER: Keyword Search in Relational Databases	2002	VLDB	0.00048017193
314	Making Database Systems Usable	2007	SIGMOD	0.00021574636
496	Schema-Free XQuery	2004	VLDB	0.0001750537
1,182	SQAK: Doing More with Keywords	2008	SIGMOD	0.00011778765
4,131	Querying Complex Structured Databases	2007	VLDB	6.8834743e-05
4,378	Keyword Search on Relational Data Streams	2007	SIGMOD	6.7356271e-05
5,609	Combining Keyword Search and Forms for Ad Hoc Querying of Databases	2009	SIGMOD	6.1514e-05
7,635	Qunits: queried units for database search	2009	CIDR	5.5769911e-05
7,999	CourseRank: A Social System for Course Planning	2009	SIGMOD	5.5093407e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

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5	5,174	An In-Depth Benchmarking of Text-to-SQL Systems	2021	SIGMOD
6	2,500	Querying Database Knowledge	1990	SIGMOD
7	3,925	A Formal Semantics of SQL Queries, Its Validation, and Applications	2018	VLDB
8	4,267	Toward Logical Data Independence: A Relational Query Language without Relations	1982	SIGMOD
9	1,558	SchemaSQL - A Language for Interoperability in Relational Multi-database Systems	1996	VLDB
10	4,131	Querying Complex Structured Databases	2007	VLDB