Overview of Data Exploration Techniques

Summary: Survey of database systems tailored for data exploration, enabling efficient knowledge discovery when goals are not fully specified. Describes storage and access primitives, interaction models for rapid focus, and future directions drawn from past work and emerging applications. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 4967
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2015
Pagerank: 0.00011594294
Overall Rank: 1,507 | 89.53%
DOI: 10.1145/2723372.2731084

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 30 of 30 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
2,135	Towards Sustainable Insights or why polygamy is bad for you	2017	CIDR	9.4681152e-05
2,151	RINSE: Interactive Data Series Exploration with ADS+	2015	VLDB	9.4234044e-05
2,494	DBEst: Revisiting Approximate Query Processing Engines with Machine Learning Models	2019	SIGMOD	8.6457436e-05
3,542	Extracting Top-K Insights from Multi-dimensional Data	2017	SIGMOD	6.9896948e-05
3,680	Efficient Selection of Geospatial Data on Maps for Interactive and Visualized Exploration	2018	SIGMOD	6.845947e-05
3,878	Data Canopy: Accelerating Exploratory Statistical Analysis	2017	SIGMOD	6.6669911e-05
4,540	Automating Exploratory Data Analysis via Machine Learning: An Overview	2020	SIGMOD	6.0978937e-05
5,520	Exploring Change – A New Dimension of Data Analytics	2019	VLDB	5.4680662e-05
5,815	Database Benchmarking for Supporting Real-Time Interactive Querying of Large Data	2020	SIGMOD	5.3158788e-05
6,057	Interactive Browsing and Navigation in Relational Databases	2016	VLDB	5.2275892e-05
6,111	Continuously Adaptive Similarity Search	2020	SIGMOD	5.2016636e-05
7,094	PICASSO: Exploratory Search of Connected Subgraph Substructures in Graph Databases	2017	VLDB	4.8293255e-05
7,642	Cross Modal Data Discovery over Structured and Unstructured Data Lakes	2023	VLDB	4.6856127e-05
7,777	Graph Querying Meets HCI: State of the Art and Future Directions	2017	SIGMOD	4.6493104e-05
7,845	Progressive Join Algorithms Considering User Preference	2021	CIDR	4.6327267e-05
8,282	Knowledge Graph Exploration Systems: are we lost?	2022	CIDR	4.5392079e-05
8,332	DBChEx: Interactive Exploration of Data and Schema Change	2019	CIDR	4.5390688e-05
9,695	The Data Interaction Game	2018	SIGMOD	4.298211e-05
9,801	Threshold Queries in Theory and in the Wild	2022	VLDB	4.2777144e-05
9,886	Graph Exploration: From Users to Large Graphs	2017	SIGMOD	4.2580321e-05
9,942	VINCENT: Towards Efficient Exploratory Subgraph Search in Graph Databases	2022	VLDB	4.241573e-05
10,378	An Adaptive Benchmark for Modeling User Exploration of Large Datasets	2025	SIGMOD	4.1905499e-05
10,790	Towards Automated Cross-domain Exploratory Data Analysis through Large Language Models	2025	VLDB	4.1905499e-05
10,840	Data Discovery in Data Lakes: Operations, Indexes, Systems	2025	VLDB	4.1905499e-05
10,864	Exploring Exploratory Querying	2025	VLDB	4.1905499e-05
11,024	SeLeP: Learning Based Semantic Prefetching for Exploratory Database Workloads	2024	VLDB	4.1905499e-05
11,412	Machine Programming: Turning Data into Programmer Productivity	2022	VLDB	4.1905499e-05
11,655	Query-Driven Learning for Next Generation Predictive Modeling & Analytics	2019	SIGMOD	4.1905499e-05
11,658	Data Pipelines for User Group Analytics	2019	SIGMOD	4.1905499e-05
11,792	Alpine: Efficient In situ Data Exploration in the Presence of Updates	2017	SIGMOD	4.1905499e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 42 of 42 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
14	Online Aggregation	1997	SIGMOD	0.0010813443
407	Database Cracking	2007	CIDR	0.00023941779
410	Timber: A Sophisticated Relation Browser	1982	VLDB	0.00023886475
431	The Aqua Approximate Query Answering System	1999	SIGMOD	0.00023397171
491	Query by Output	2009	SIGMOD	0.00021960753
701	Building Efficient Query Engines in a High-Level Language	2014	VLDB	0.00017893039
1,025	Query Steering for Interactive Data Exploration	2013	CIDR	0.00014600179
1,346	NoDB: Efficient Query Execution on Raw Data Files	2012	SIGMOD	0.00012472598
1,502	Discovering Queries based on Example Tuples	2014	SIGMOD	0.00011614522
1,735	SciBORQ: Scientific data management with Bounds On Runtime and Quality	2011	CIDR	0.00010713691
1,801	H2O: A Hands-free Adaptive Store	2014	SIGMOD	0.00010485628
1,844	The Researcher’s Guide to the Data Deluge: Querying a Scientific Database in Just a Few Seconds	2011	VLDB	0.00010339715
1,845	dbTouch: Analytics at your Fingertips	2013	CIDR	0.00010339281
1,849	Combining User Interaction, Speculative Query Execution and Sampling in the DICE System	2014	VLDB	0.00010331082
1,867	Knowing When You’re Wrong: Building Fast and Reliable Approximate Query Processing Systems	2014	SIGMOD	0.00010264932
1,898	Guided Interaction: Rethinking the Query-Result Paradigm	2011	VLDB	0.00010172275
1,918	VizDeck: Self-Organizing Dashboards for Visual Analytics	2012	SIGMOD	0.00010098963
2,005	Rapid Sampling for Visualizations with Ordering Guarantees	2015	VLDB	9.8168893e-05
2,231	Self-organizing Tuple Reconstruction in Column-stores	2009	SIGMOD	9.2367968e-05
2,361	Merging What’s Cracked, Cracking What’s Merged: Adaptive Indexing in Main-Memory Column-Stores	2011	VLDB	8.9648608e-05
2,367	Here are my Data Files. Here are my Queries. Where are my Results?	2011	CIDR	8.9502761e-05
2,414	Towards a One Size Fits All Database Architecture	2011	CIDR	8.8572378e-05
2,577	S4: Top-k Spreadsheet-Style Search for Query Discovery	2015	SIGMOD	8.5066436e-05
2,614	i3: Intelligent, Interactive Investigation of OLAP data cubes	2000	SIGMOD	8.4538942e-05
2,738	The Case for Data Visualization Management Systems [Vision Paper]	2014	VLDB	8.2039241e-05
2,751	Learning and Verifying Quantified Boolean Queries by Example	2013	PODS	8.1725194e-05
2,975	Parallel In-Situ Data Processing with Speculative Loading	2014	SIGMOD	7.7871791e-05
2,979	The Uncracked Pieces in Database Cracking	2014	VLDB	7.7833926e-05
3,076	Explore-by-Example: An Automatic Query Steering Framework for Interactive Data Exploration	2014	SIGMOD	7.6063803e-05
3,192	Gestural Query Specification	2014	VLDB	7.4085087e-05
3,279	The Case for RodentStore, an Adaptive, Declarative Storage System	2009	CIDR	7.2816693e-05
3,441	Interactive Data Exploration Using Semantic Windows	2014	SIGMOD	7.0891447e-05
3,897	Updating a Cracked Database	2007	SIGMOD	6.6526754e-05
4,199	Meet Charles, big data query advisor	2013	CIDR	6.3618577e-05
4,507	Stochastic Database Cracking: Towards Robust Adaptive Indexing in Main-Memory Column-Stores	2012	VLDB	6.1271582e-05
4,590	Playful Query Specification with DataPlay	2012	VLDB	6.0563264e-05
4,751	Indexing for Interactive Exploration of Big Data Series	2014	SIGMOD	5.9411478e-05
4,825	Querying Without Keyboards	2013	CIDR	5.889464e-05
5,263	SeeDB: Visualizing Database Queries Efficiently	2014	VLDB	5.5959099e-05
6,056	SCOUT: Prefetching for Latent Structure Following Queries	2012	VLDB	5.2286221e-05
6,201	Concurrency Control for Adaptive Indexing	2012	VLDB	5.1559919e-05
6,888	AstroShelf: Understanding the Universe Through Scalable Navigation of a Galaxy of Annotations	2012	SIGMOD	4.8902106e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
4,237	Databases and Visualization	1996	SIGMOD	6.3279563e-05
12,257	Mining Knowledge from Databases: An Information Network Analysis Approach	2010	SIGMOD	4.1905499e-05
13,940	Clustering Methods for Large Databases: From the Past to the Future	1999	SIGMOD	-
4,540	Automating Exploratory Data Analysis via Machine Learning: An Overview	2020	SIGMOD	6.0978937e-05
4,755	Optimization for Active Learning-based Interactive Database Exploration	2019	VLDB	5.9375171e-05
9,886	Graph Exploration: From Users to Large Graphs	2017	SIGMOD	4.2580321e-05
14,034	Data Mining Techniques	1996	SIGMOD	-
9,429	Database Principles in Information Extraction	2014	PODS	4.3399748e-05
6,235	New Trends on Exploratory Methods for Data Analytics	2017	VLDB	5.1386078e-05
8,338	Exploring the Data Wilderness through Examples	2019	SIGMOD	4.538469e-05