Preferences: Putting More Knowledge into Queries

Summary: Adds a formal preference mechanism to a Domain Relational Calculus-based query language to express desirable qualifications alongside mandatory predicates. Demonstrates expressive power and applicability to software configuration management, enabling queries to model soft constraints. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 7995
Venue: VLDB
Year: 1987
Pagerank: 6.297911e-05
Overall Rank: 5,256 | 63.95%
DOI: -

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. M. Lacroix (Philips)
2. P. Lavency (Philips)

BibTeX Citation

@article{lacroix_vldb87,
        title = {{Preferences: Putting More Knowledge into Queries}},
        author = {Lacroix, M. and Lavency, P.},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '87},
        pages = {217},
        year = {1987}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 2 of 2 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,818	A Probabilistic Framework for Vague Queries and Imprecise Information in Databases	1990	VLDB	9.6827488e-05
2,932	Multi-objective Query Processing for Database Systems	2004	VLDB	7.9475864e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 0 of 0 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank

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7	1,134	A Framework for Expressing and Combining Preferences	2000	SIGMOD
8	5,532	Qualified Answers That Reflect User Needs and Preferences	1994	VLDB
9	12,320	PrefDB: Bringing Preferences Closer to the DBMS	2012	SIGMOD
10	656	Foundations of Preferences in Database Systems	2002	VLDB