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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
4845
Venue
SIGMOD
Year
2014
Pagerank
0.00015174751
Overall Rank
663 | 95.46%
DOI
10.1145/2588555.2588578

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{roy_sigmod14,
        title = {{A Formal Approach to Finding Explanations for Database Queries}},
        author = {Roy, Sudeepa and Suciu, Dan},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '14},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/2588555.2588578},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2588555.2588578},
        year = {2014}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 50 of 67 citing papers.

Rank Citing Paper Year Venue Pagerank
1,792 MacroBase: Prioritizing Attention in Fast Data 2017 SIGMOD 9.7436856e-05
2,161 DIFF: A Relational Interface for Large-Scale Data Explanation 2019 VLDB 9.0606664e-05
2,185 Data Polygamy: The Many-Many Relationships among Urban Spatio-Temporal Data Sets 2016 SIGMOD 9.0026006e-05
2,195 Explaining Query Answers with Explanation-Ready Databases 2016 VLDB 8.9713779e-05
2,374 Causal Relational Learning 2020 SIGMOD 8.6755064e-05
2,565 Database Repairs and Consistent Query Answering: Origins and Further Developments 2019 PODS 8.4116912e-05
2,584 Complaint-driven Training Data Debugging for Query 2.0 2020 SIGMOD 8.3783546e-05
2,759 Data X-Ray: A Diagnostic Tool for Data Errors 2015 SIGMOD 8.1577506e-05
3,004 SCODED: Statistical Constraint Oriented Data Error Detection 2020 SIGMOD 7.8608629e-05
3,991 The Complexity of Resilience and Responsibility for Self-Join-Free Conjunctive Queries 2016 VLDB 6.9695922e-05
4,602 Provenance for Natural Language Queries 2017 VLDB 6.6107638e-05
4,638 Going Beyond Provenance: Explaining Query Answers with Pattern-based Counterbalances 2019 SIGMOD 6.5919801e-05
4,670 New Results for the Complexity of Resilience for Binary Conjunctive Queries with Self-Joins 2020 PODS 6.5734205e-05
4,747 High-Level Why-Not Explanations using Ontologies 2015 PODS 6.5252099e-05
4,759 Explaining Wrong Queries Using Small Examples 2019 SIGMOD 6.5207388e-05
4,805 Efficient Answering of Historical What-if Queries 2022 SIGMOD 6.5003306e-05
4,876 XInsight: eXplainable Data Analysis Through The Lens of Causality 2023 SIGMOD 6.4687705e-05
4,959 QFix: Diagnosing Errors through Query Histories 2017 SIGMOD 6.4283324e-05
5,050 CAPE: Explaining Outliers by Counterbalancing 2019 VLDB 6.3862246e-05
5,054 Explainable AI: Foundations, Applications, Opportunities for Data Management Research 2022 SIGMOD 6.3843089e-05
5,131 Enabling SQL-based Training Data Debugging for Federated Learning 2022 VLDB 6.3537809e-05
5,396 Putting Things into Context: Rich Explanations for Query Answers using Join Graphs 2021 SIGMOD 6.2329373e-05
5,937 Perturbation Analysis of Database Queries 2016 VLDB 6.0350628e-05
6,360 Approximate Summaries for Why and Why-not Provenance 2020 VLDB 5.9009081e-05
6,461 Explain3D: Explaining Disagreements in Disjoint Datasets 2019 VLDB 5.8718966e-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
6,664 On Multiple Semantics for Declarative Database Repairs 2020 SIGMOD 5.8090585e-05
6,884 Explaining Inference Queries with Bayesian Optimization 2021 VLDB 5.7465524e-05
6,932 Summarized Causal Explanations For Aggregate Views 2024 SIGMOD 5.7362362e-05
7,269 A Unified Approach for Resilience and Causal Responsibility with Integer Linear Programming (ILP) and LP Relaxations 2023 SIGMOD 5.6595955e-05
7,383 ExplainED: Explanations for EDA Notebooks 2020 VLDB 5.6284447e-05
7,739 Video-zilla: An Indexing Layer for Large-Scale Video Analytics 2022 SIGMOD 5.5553554e-05
7,977 Interactive Query Explanations Using Fine Grained Provenance 2022 SIGMOD 5.5152578e-05
8,184 FEDEX: An Explainability Framework for Data Exploration Steps 2022 VLDB 5.4709725e-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
8,719 DPXPlain: Privately Explaining Aggregate Query Answers 2023 VLDB 5.3774243e-05
8,737 Sommelier: Curating DNN Models for the Masses 2022 SIGMOD 5.3766157e-05
8,852 LensXPlain: Visualizing and Explaining Contributing Subsets for Aggregate Query Answers 2019 VLDB 5.357688e-05
8,889 Provenance-based Data Skipping 2022 VLDB 5.3512428e-05
8,901 NLC: Search Correlated Window Pairs on Long Time Series 2022 VLDB 5.3492083e-05
8,970 Understanding Queries by Conditional Instances 2022 SIGMOD 5.3422757e-05
9,055 Causal DAG Summarization 2025 VLDB 5.3251649e-05
9,416 Equivalence-Invariant Algebraic Provenance for Hyperplane Update Queries 2020 SIGMOD 5.2742007e-05
9,713 TSExplain: Surfacing Evolving Explanations for Time Series 2021 SIGMOD 5.2342614e-05
9,773 Fair and Actionable Causal Prescription Ruleset 2025 SIGMOD 5.2209769e-05
9,842 CaJaDE: Explaining Query Results by Augmenting Provenance with Context 2022 VLDB 5.210037e-05
9,999 Discovering Top-k Relevant and Diversified Rules 2024 SIGMOD 5.1814573e-05
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Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

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