Automatic Example Queries for Ad Hoc Databases

Summary: Automatic generation of starter SQL queries over unstructured, schema-less table collections without logs or prior input. From public databases, learns operator-specific models and assembles queries piecewise; shows how dataset statistics shape feasible starter queries to bootstrap non-experts. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: he910a70ae6f9aaa3
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2011
Pagerank: 6.6919508e-05
Overall Rank: 4,273 | 71.28%
DOI: 10.1145/1989323.1989487

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Bill Howe (University of Washington)
2. Garret Cole (University of Washington)
3. Nodira Khoussainova (University of Washington)
4. Leilani Battle (University of Washington)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{howe_sigmod11,
        title = {{Automatic Example Queries for Ad Hoc Databases}},
        author = {Howe, Bill and Cole, Garret and Khoussainova, Nodira and Battle, Leilani},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '11},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/1989323.1989487},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1989323.1989487},
        year = {2011}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 4 of 4 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,211	Query From Examples: An Iterative, Data-Driven Approach to Query Construction	2015	VLDB	0.00011524858
3,693	Changing the Face of Database Cloud Services with Personalized Service Level Agreements	2015	CIDR	7.093442e-05
10,714	SQL-Exchange: Transforming SQL Queries Across Domains	2026	VLDB	4.9793485e-05
11,968	PyExplore: Query Recommendations for Data Exploration without Query Logs	2021	SIGMOD	4.9793485e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 5 of 5 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
296	Generic Schema Matching with Cupid	2001	VLDB	0.00021867512
484	Data Integration for the Relational Web	2009	VLDB	0.00017548541
793	Model Management 2.0: Manipulating Richer Mappings	2007	SIGMOD	0.00013942384
1,558	Summarizing Relational Databases	2009	VLDB	0.00010257165
2,883	SQL QueRIE Recommendations	2010	VLDB	7.9108916e-05

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