Schema-free SQL

Summary: Introduce Schema-free SQL, a RDB query language enabling partial schema, tolerating unknown relation/attr names and missing join paths. A translator converts Schema-free SQL to full SQL; schema info yields results as if fully specified. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: hc31af1780ff4c58d
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2014
Pagerank: 5.6950798e-05
Overall Rank: 6,724 | 54.80%
DOI: 10.1145/2588555.2588571

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Fei Li (University of Michigan)
2. Tianyin Pan (University of Michigan)
3. H. V. Jagadish (University of Michigan)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{li_sigmod14,
        title = {{Schema-free SQL}},
        author = {Li, Fei and Pan, Tianyin and Jagadish, H. V.},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '14},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/2588555.2588571},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2588555.2588571},
        year = {2014}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 3 of 3 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
2,550	SQLShare: Results from a Multi-Year SQL-as-a-Service Experiment	2016	SIGMOD	8.3121033e-05
6,093	Interactive Browsing and Navigation in Relational Databases	2016	VLDB	5.8894913e-05
9,349	Management of Flexible Schema Data in RDBMSs - Opportunities and Limitations for NoSQL	2015	CIDR	5.1897188e-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
38	DISCOVER: Keyword Search in Relational Databases	2002	VLDB	0.00047394041
319	Making Database Systems Usable	2007	SIGMOD	0.00021164857
505	Schema-Free XQuery	2004	VLDB	0.00017161757
1,182	SQAK: Doing More with Keywords	2008	SIGMOD	0.0001161771
4,208	Querying Complex Structured Databases	2007	VLDB	6.7339511e-05
4,447	Keyword Search on Relational Data Streams	2007	SIGMOD	6.5968014e-05
5,724	Combining Keyword Search and Forms for Ad Hoc Querying of Databases	2009	SIGMOD	6.0174945e-05
7,791	Qunits: queried units for database search	2009	CIDR	5.4518584e-05
8,163	CourseRank: A Social System for Course Planning	2009	SIGMOD	5.3861399e-05

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9	1,578	SchemaSQL - A Language for Interoperability in Relational Multi-database Systems	1996	VLDB
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