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: 6141
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2021
Pagerank: 4.6768157e-05
Overall Rank: 7,678 | 46.64%
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
5,839	Why Not Yet: Fixing a Top-k Ranking that Is Not Fair to Individuals	2023	VLDB	5.3073497e-05
8,142	Erebus: Explaining the Outputs of Data Streaming Queries	2023	VLDB	4.5724134e-05
9,703	Debugging Missing Answers for Spark Queries over Nested Data with Breadcrumb	2021	VLDB	4.2964668e-05
10,289	Efficient Query Repair for Aggregate Constraints	2026	VLDB	4.1905499e-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
383	COMA - A system for flexible combination of schema matching approaches	2002	VLDB	0.00024802484
487	Why Not?	2009	SIGMOD	0.00022030123
547	Schema-Free XQuery	2004	VLDB	0.00020372992
968	Schema and Ontology Matching with COMA++	2005	SIGMOD	0.00014941789
1,124	How to ConQueR Why-Not Questions	2010	SIGMOD	0.00013832959
1,441	Provenance for Generalized Map and Reduce Workflows	2011	CIDR	0.00011950114
2,031	Putting Lipstick on Pig: Enabling Database-style Workflow Provenance	2012	VLDB	9.7341007e-05
2,280	Generating Targeted Queries for Database Testing	2008	SIGMOD	9.1247368e-05
2,990	FastQRE: Fast Query Reverse Engineering	2018	SIGMOD	7.7727915e-05
3,302	RTED: A Robust Algorithm for the Tree Edit Distance	2012	VLDB	7.2445358e-05
3,668	Reverse Engineering Aggregation Queries	2017	VLDB	6.8581987e-05
3,684	SPARQLByE: Querying RDF data by example	2016	VLDB	6.8399983e-05
5,275	Annotated XML: Queries and Provenance	2008	PODS	5.5908918e-05
6,675	Exploiting Common Patterns for Tree-Structured Data	2017	SIGMOD	4.9615691e-05
6,974	NLProveNAns: Natural Language Provenance for Non-Answers	2018	VLDB	4.8725777e-05
8,228	You Say 'What', I Hear 'Where' and 'Why' - (Mis-)Interpreting SQL to Derive Fine-Grained Provenance	2018	VLDB	4.549777e-05
9,851	Adaptive Schema Databases	2017	CIDR	4.2680295e-05

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2,655	Explaining Query Answers with Explanation-Ready Databases	2016	VLDB	8.3638668e-05
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943	A Formal Approach to Finding Explanations for Database Queries	2014	SIGMOD	0.00015140995
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