Reverse Engineering Aggregation Queries

Summary: REGAL: a 3-phase approach to reverse engineering OLAP queries lattice-guided group-by discovery, aggregation-constraint pruning, and multi-dim filter synthesis to reproduce the output. Validated on TPC-H, showing practical recovery of the original SQL. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: h19cb49ed12000ea5
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2017
Pagerank: 7.391292e-05
Overall Rank: 3,349 | 77.49%
DOI: 10.14778/3137628.3137633

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Wei Chit Tan (Singapore Institute of Technology)
2. Meihui Zhang (Singapore Institute of Technology)
3. Hazem Elmeleegy (Turn Inc.)
4. Divesh Srivastava (AT&T)

BibTeX Citation

@article{tan_vldb17,
        title = {{Reverse Engineering Aggregation Queries}},
        author = {Tan, Wei Chit and Zhang, Meihui and Elmeleegy, Hazem and Srivastava, Divesh},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '17},
        volume = {10},
        number = {11},
        pages = {1394--1407},
        doi = {10.14778/3137628.3137633},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/3137628.3137633},
        year = {2017}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 12 of 12 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,845	Data Market Platforms: Trading Data Assets to Solve Data Problems	2020	VLDB	9.5136397e-05
2,598	Complaint-driven Training Data Debugging for Query 2.0	2020	SIGMOD	8.2385793e-05
2,679	FastQRE: Fast Query Reverse Engineering	2018	SIGMOD	8.1453935e-05
3,461	REGAL+: Reverse Engineering SPJA Queries	2018	VLDB	7.2839794e-05
3,504	Example-Driven Query Intent Discovery: Abductive Reasoning using Semantic Similarity	2019	VLDB	7.2516839e-05
5,520	PATSQL: Efficient Synthesis of SQL Queries from Example Tables with Quick Inference of Projected Columns	2021	VLDB	6.0964774e-05
6,725	SQUARES: A SQL Synthesizer Using Query Reverse Engineering	2020	VLDB	5.6949573e-05
7,879	To Not Miss the Forest for the Trees - A Holistic Approach for Explaining Missing Answers over Nested Data	2021	SIGMOD	5.4341576e-05
9,109	Generation of Training Examples for Tabular Natural Language Inference	2023	SIGMOD	5.2280464e-05
9,137	Shedding Light on Opaque Application Queries	2021	SIGMOD	5.2222795e-05
10,235	Scalable and Usable Relational Learning With Automatic Language Bias	2021	SIGMOD	5.0547931e-05
11,975	On Optimizing the Trade-off between Privacy and Utility in Data Provenance	2021	SIGMOD	4.9793485e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 8 of 8 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
38	DISCOVER: Keyword Search in Relational Databases	2002	VLDB	0.00047394041
518	Query by Output	2009	SIGMOD	0.00016944862
1,211	Query From Examples: An Iterative, Data-Driven Approach to Query Construction	2015	VLDB	0.00011524858
1,272	Discovering Queries based on Example Tuples	2014	SIGMOD	0.00011248674
1,345	Reverse Engineering Complex Join Queries	2013	SIGMOD	0.00010953079
1,776	Sample-Driven Schema Mapping	2012	SIGMOD	9.6674087e-05
1,953	DBXplorer: Enabling Keyword Search over Relational Databases	2002	SIGMOD	9.3183947e-05
8,151	Schema Independent Relational Learning	2017	SIGMOD	5.3899758e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	202	Aggregate-Query Processing in Data Warehousing Environments	1995	VLDB
2	7,138	The Generalized Pre-Grouping Transformation: Aggregate Query Optimization in the Presence of Dependencies	2003	VLDB
3	12,887	When is it Time to Rethink the Aggregate Configuration of Your OLAP Server?	2008	VLDB
4	12,606	Dynamic Optimization of Generalized SQL Queries with Horizontal Aggregations	2012	SIGMOD
5	2,679	FastQRE: Fast Query Reverse Engineering	2018	SIGMOD
6	1,898	Querying Multiple Features of Groups in Relational Databases	1996	VLDB
7	5,200	Extending Practical Pre-Aggregation in On-Line Analytical Processing	1999	VLDB
8	700	Explaining differences in multidimensional aggregates	1999	VLDB
9	1,345	Reverse Engineering Complex Join Queries	2013	SIGMOD
10	3,461	REGAL+: Reverse Engineering SPJA Queries	2018	VLDB