Automatic Discovery of Attributes in Relational Databases

Summary: Data-driven clustering of relational columns to discover attributes, without external knowledge. Treats the database as a column-relationship graph and partitions it into connected components to form attribute clusters; experiments on real and synthetic data validate schema matching. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: heb4f7314ecdd7d5e
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2011
Pagerank: 7.2765721e-05
Overall Rank: 3,470 | 76.68%
DOI: 10.1145/1989323.1989336

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Meihui Zhang (National University of Singapore)
2. Marios Hadjieleftheriou (AT&T)
3. Beng Chin Ooi (National University of Singapore)
4. Cecilia M. Procopiuc (AT&T)
5. Divesh Srivastava (AT&T)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{zhang_sigmod11,
        title = {{Automatic Discovery of Attributes in Relational Databases}},
        author = {Zhang, Meihui and Hadjieleftheriou, Marios and Ooi, Beng Chin and Procopiuc, Cecilia M. and Srivastava, Divesh},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '11},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/1989323.1989336},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1989323.1989336},
        year = {2011}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 11 of 11 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,780	Annotating Columns with Pre-trained Language Models	2022	SIGMOD	9.6560923e-05
2,679	FastQRE: Fast Query Reverse Engineering	2018	SIGMOD	8.1453935e-05
4,159	Integrating Data Lake Tables	2023	VLDB	6.7717519e-05
4,218	Magneto: Combining Small and Large Language Models for Schema Matching	2025	VLDB	6.7270169e-05
5,135	Fast Foreign-Key Detection in Microsoft SQL Server PowerPivot for Excel	2014	VLDB	6.2587553e-05
8,144	Synthesizing Mapping Relationships Using Table Corpus	2017	SIGMOD	5.3910618e-05
8,574	OmniMatch: Joinability Discovery in Data Products	2025	VLDB	5.312217e-05
11,295	OpenForge: Probabilistic Metadata Integration	2025	VLDB	4.9793485e-05
11,720	Steered Training Data Generation for Learned Semantic Type Detection	2023	SIGMOD	4.9793485e-05
11,744	VersaMatch: Ontology Matching with Weak Supervision	2023	VLDB	4.9793485e-05
12,278	Building Structured Databases of Factual Knowledge from Massive Text Corpora	2017	SIGMOD	4.9793485e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 7 of 7 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
20	Similarity Search in High Dimensions via Hashing	1999	VLDB	0.00057568153
296	Generic Schema Matching with Cupid	2001	VLDB	0.00021867512
407	COMA - A system for flexible combination of schema matching approaches	2002	VLDB	0.00019026291
465	Using Schema Matching to Simplify Heterogeneous Data Translation	1998	VLDB	0.00017785121
822	On Schema Matching with Opaque Column Names and Data Values	2003	SIGMOD	0.00013651306
1,532	On Multi-Column Foreign Key Discovery	2010	VLDB	0.00010332696
1,759	Rondo: A Programming Platform for Generic Model Management	2003	SIGMOD	9.7107065e-05

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#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	3,974	On the Complexity of Deriving Schema Mappings from Database Instances	2008	PODS
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3	11,492	Improved Approximation Algorithms for Relational Clustering	2024	PODS
4	3,287	Comprehensive Approach to the Design of Relational Database Schemes	1984	VLDB
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