You Say ‘What’, I Hear ‘Where’ and ‘Why’ — (Mis-)Interpreting SQL to Derive Fine-Grained Provenance

Summary: A compositional source-level rewrite reinterprets SQL over dependency values to derive cell-level provenance: where outputs originated and why they appear. Supports recursion, window aggregates, and UDFs while preserving query/data shape for scalable, non-invasive execution. (summarized by gpt-5.6-luna on Jul 24 2026)

Paper ID: hb6b4fac2fe85f3f3
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2018
Pagerank: 5.4466474e-05
Overall Rank: 7,819 | 47.43%
DOI: 10.14778/3236187.3236204

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Tobias Müller (University of Tübingen)
2. Benjamin Dietrich (University of Tübingen)
3. Torsten Grust (University of Tübingen)

BibTeX Citation

@article{muller_vldb18,
        title = {{You Say ‘What’, I Hear ‘Where’ and ‘Why’ — (Mis-)Interpreting SQL to Derive Fine-Grained Provenance}},
        author = {Müller, Tobias and Dietrich, Benjamin and Grust, Torsten},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '18},
        volume = {11},
        number = {11},
        pages = {1536--1549},
        doi = {10.14778/3236187.3236204},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/3236187.3236204},
        year = {2018}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 4 of 4 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
6,046	Your notebook is not crumby enough, REPLace it	2020	CIDR	5.9052121e-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
8,495	Provenance-based Data Skipping	2022	VLDB	5.3304338e-05
10,843	I-Rex: An Interactive Debugger for SQL	2026	VLDB	4.9793485e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 14 of 14 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
17	Provenance Semirings	2007	PODS	0.00059752575
23	Spark SQL: Relational Data Processing in Spark	2015	SIGMOD	0.00055406774
84	ULDBs: Databases with Uncertainty and Lineage	2006	VLDB	0.00035963861
105	The MADlib Analytics Library or MAD Skills, the SQL	2012	VLDB	0.00033638251
391	Why Not?	2009	SIGMOD	0.00019238698
591	Lineage Tracing for General Data Warehouse Transformations	2001	VLDB	0.00015888097
778	The case against specialized graph analytics engines	2015	CIDR	0.00014043807
1,171	Set Containment Joins: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly	2000	VLDB	0.00011702886
1,827	Querying Data Provenance	2010	SIGMOD	9.5545888e-05
2,095	A Polygen Model for Heterogeneous Database Systems: The Source Tagging Perspective	1990	VLDB	9.0564714e-05
4,940	Explaining Outputs in Modern Data Analytics	2016	VLDB	6.345789e-05
7,313	Debugging Transactions and Tracking their Provenance with Reenactment	2017	VLDB	5.5551018e-05
9,414	Provenance for SQL through Abstract Interpretation: Value-less, but Worthwhile	2015	VLDB	5.1815574e-05
9,545	Computational Reproducibility: State-of-the-Art, Challenges, and Database Research Opportunities	2012	SIGMOD	5.1609034e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	8,275	The Complexity of Why-Provenance for Datalog Queries	2024	PODS
2	8,583	OneProvenance: Efficient Extraction of Dynamic Coarse-Grained Provenance From Database Query Event Logs	2023	VLDB
3	7,703	Interactive Query Explanations Using Fine Grained Provenance	2022	SIGMOD
4	6,451	Tracing Lineage Beyond Relational Operators	2007	VLDB
5	5,529	Putting Things into Context: Rich Explanations for Query Answers using Join Graphs	2021	SIGMOD
6	10,879	Computing Why-Provenance for Property Graph Queries	2026	VLDB
7	1,827	Querying Data Provenance	2010	SIGMOD
8	6,457	On Provenance Minimization	2011	PODS
9	819	Provenance for Aggregate Queries	2011	PODS
10	9,414	Provenance for SQL through Abstract Interpretation: Value-less, but Worthwhile	2015	VLDB