Query by Output

Summary: Query By Output (QBO) derives instance-equivalent queries Q' from Q(D) with a data-driven, classification-based approach that handles at-least-one semantics. It introduces optimizations and utility-based ranking to achieve scalable, robust generation across real datasets. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: h156b80b7e5b7cbf5
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2009
Pagerank: 0.00016937515
Overall Rank: 519 | 96.52%
DOI: 10.1145/1559845.1559902

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Quoc Trung Tran (National University of Singapore)
2. Chee-Yong Chan (National University of Singapore)
3. Srinivasan Parthasarathy (National University of Singapore; Ohio State University)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{tran_sigmod09,
        title = {{Query by Output}},
        author = {Tran, Quoc Trung and Chan, Chee-Yong and Parthasarathy, Srinivasan},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '09},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/1559845.1559902},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1559845.1559902},
        year = {2009}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 31 of 31 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
790	Cosette: An Automated Prover for SQL	2017	CIDR	0.00013971102
791	How to ConQueR Why-Not Questions	2010	SIGMOD	0.00013970743
1,216	Overview of Data Exploration Techniques	2015	SIGMOD	0.00011487268
1,273	Discovering Queries based on Example Tuples	2014	SIGMOD	0.00011243661
1,345	Reverse Engineering Complex Join Queries	2013	SIGMOD	0.00010948072
2,222	Explaining Query Answers with Explanation-Ready Databases	2016	VLDB	8.8106741e-05
2,413	S4: Top-k Spreadsheet-Style Search for Query Discovery	2015	SIGMOD	8.5063082e-05
2,472	Keyword++: A Framework to Improve Keyword Search Over Entity Databases	2010	VLDB	8.410222e-05
2,679	FastQRE: Fast Query Reverse Engineering	2018	SIGMOD	8.1415698e-05
2,685	Learning and Verifying Quantified Boolean Queries by Example	2013	PODS	8.1334309e-05
3,005	Gestural Query Specification	2014	VLDB	7.7609244e-05
3,172	Toward Computational Fact-Checking	2014	VLDB	7.5658423e-05
3,349	Reverse Engineering Aggregation Queries	2017	VLDB	7.3878253e-05
3,461	REGAL+: Reverse Engineering SPJA Queries	2018	VLDB	7.2806224e-05
3,482	SPARQLByE: Querying RDF data by example	2016	VLDB	7.263568e-05
3,587	Learning Semantic String Transformations from Examples	2012	VLDB	7.1847226e-05
4,235	Auto-Pipeline: Synthesizing Complex Data Pipelines By-Target Using Reinforcement Learning and Search	2021	VLDB	6.710043e-05
4,327	Query Refinement for Diversity Constraint Satisfaction	2024	VLDB	6.6600895e-05
4,509	Optimization for Active Learning-based Interactive Database Exploration	2019	VLDB	6.5684897e-05
4,662	Reverse Engineering SPJ-Queries from Examples	2017	PODS	6.4792038e-05
4,835	Interactive Query Synthesis from Input-Output Examples	2017	SIGMOD	6.3864459e-05
5,168	Auto-Tables: Synthesizing Multi-Step Transformations to Relationalize Tables without Using Examples	2023	VLDB	6.2432932e-05
5,831	FluxQuery: An Execution Framework for Highly Interactive Query Workloads	2016	SIGMOD	5.9755208e-05
6,522	Query Refinement for Diverse Top-k Selection	2024	SIGMOD	5.7546462e-05
7,531	Auto-Prep: Holistic Prediction of Data Preparation Steps for Self-Service Business Intelligence	2025	VLDB	5.4994676e-05
8,516	Exploring the Data Wilderness through Examples	2019	SIGMOD	5.3239705e-05
9,304	DataDiff: User-Interpretable Data Transformation Summaries for Collaborative Data Analysis	2018	SIGMOD	5.1971324e-05
10,021	The Data Interaction Game	2018	SIGMOD	5.0935279e-05
11,808	Erica: Query Refinement for Diversity Constraint Satisfaction	2023	VLDB	4.9769913e-05
12,095	SPARQL Rewriting: Towards Desired Results	2020	SIGMOD	4.9769913e-05
12,371	Exploring Databases via Reverse Engineering Ranking Queries with PALEO	2016	VLDB	4.9769913e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 9 of 9 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
286	Selectivity Estimation using Probabilistic Models	2001	SIGMOD	0.00022112534
319	Making Database Systems Usable	2007	SIGMOD	0.00021155013
748	QAGen: Generating Query-Aware Test Databases	2007	SIGMOD	0.00014277246
1,077	Curated Databases	2008	PODS	0.00012153352
1,893	Generating Targeted Queries for Database Testing	2008	SIGMOD	9.4149369e-05
1,970	Information-Theoretic Tools for Mining Database Structure from Large Data Sets	2004	SIGMOD	9.2892451e-05
3,993	Output Perturbation with Query Relaxation	2008	VLDB	6.8652975e-05
4,251	Exploiting Constraint-Like Data Characterizations in Query Optimization	2001	SIGMOD	6.6998241e-05
4,307	Discovering Topical Structures of Databases	2008	SIGMOD	6.6723067e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	1,090	Scalable Approximate Query Processing With The DBO Engine	2007	SIGMOD
2	2,999	Multi-objective Query Processing for Database Systems	2004	VLDB
3	7,502	Boolean + Ranking: Querying a Database by K-Constrained Optimization	2006	SIGMOD
4	51	Efficient Query Evaluation on Probabilistic Databases	2004	VLDB
5	2,243	Automatic Categorization of Query Results	2004	SIGMOD
6	4,208	Querying Complex Structured Databases	2007	VLDB
7	9,069	Understanding Queries by Conditional Instances	2022	SIGMOD
8	569	Towards a Robust Query Optimizer: A Principled and Practical Approach	2005	SIGMOD
9	2,548	Querying Database Knowledge	1990	SIGMOD
10	1,557	Ordering the Attributes of Query Results	2006	SIGMOD