To Not Miss the Forest for the Trees - A Holistic Approach for Explaining Missing Answers over Nested Data

Summary: Proposes a holistic, query-based explanation framework for missing answers over nested data, treating schema-modifying operators as potential causes. A heuristic uses multiple schema alternatives and iterative re-validation to prune non-contributing intermediates, enabling scalable Spark-based explanations that outperform prior work. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 6140
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2021
Pagerank: 4.6813062e-05
Overall Rank: 7,678 | 46.59%
DOI: 10.1145/3448016.3457249

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 4 of 4 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
5,826	Why Not Yet: Fixing a Top-k Ranking that Is Not Fair to Individuals	2023	VLDB	5.3124507e-05
8,140	Erebus: Explaining the Outputs of Data Streaming Queries	2023	VLDB	4.5768015e-05
9,704	Debugging Missing Answers for Spark Queries over Nested Data with Breadcrumb	2021	VLDB	4.3005882e-05
10,277	Efficient Query Repair for Aggregate Constraints	2026	VLDB	4.1945683e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 17 of 17 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
382	COMA - A system for flexible combination of schema matching approaches	2002	VLDB	0.00024823252
487	Why Not?	2009	SIGMOD	0.00022050218
548	Schema-Free XQuery	2004	VLDB	0.00020391259
968	Schema and Ontology Matching with COMA++	2005	SIGMOD	0.0001495703
1,125	How to ConQueR Why-Not Questions	2010	SIGMOD	0.00013845652
1,440	Provenance for Generalized Map and Reduce Workflows	2011	CIDR	0.00011961469
2,028	Putting Lipstick on Pig: Enabling Database-style Workflow Provenance	2012	VLDB	9.7433981e-05
2,277	Generating Targeted Queries for Database Testing	2008	SIGMOD	9.1241198e-05
2,982	FastQRE: Fast Query Reverse Engineering	2018	SIGMOD	7.7801984e-05
3,301	RTED: A Robust Algorithm for the Tree Edit Distance	2012	VLDB	7.2515266e-05
3,663	Reverse Engineering Aggregation Queries	2017	VLDB	6.8647221e-05
3,684	SPARQLByE: Querying RDF data by example	2016	VLDB	6.8465042e-05
5,270	Annotated XML: Queries and Provenance	2008	PODS	5.5963545e-05
6,674	Exploiting Common Patterns for Tree-Structured Data	2017	SIGMOD	4.9663344e-05
6,975	NLProveNAns: Natural Language Provenance for Non-Answers	2018	VLDB	4.8772572e-05
8,230	You Say 'What', I Hear 'Where' and 'Why' - (Mis-)Interpreting SQL to Derive Fine-Grained Provenance	2018	VLDB	4.5541444e-05
9,851	Adaptive Schema Databases	2017	CIDR	4.2721228e-05

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12,534	A Nested Relational Approach to Processing SQL Subqueries	2005	SIGMOD	4.1945683e-05
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942	A Formal Approach to Finding Explanations for Database Queries	2014	SIGMOD	0.00015155714
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