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A Formal Approach to Finding Explanations for Database Queries

Summary: Formal, intervention-based explanations for SQL query results, modeling how tuple deletions alter outputs under foreign-key interactions. Recursive rules compute interventions with polynomial data complexity; SQL-based top-K explanations under practical conditions, evaluated on real datasets. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID
hf227de9c66d0b52a
Venue
SIGMOD
Year
2014
Pagerank
0.00014948069
Overall Rank
671 | 95.50%
DOI
10.1145/2588555.2588578

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{roy_sigmod14,
        title = {{A Formal Approach to Finding Explanations for Database Queries}},
        author = {Roy, Sudeepa and Suciu, Dan},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '14},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/2588555.2588578},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2588555.2588578},
        year = {2014}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 50 of 67 citing papers.

Rank Citing Paper Year Venue Pagerank
1,833 MacroBase: Prioritizing Attention in Fast Data 2017 SIGMOD 9.5376219e-05
2,155 Data Polygamy: The Many-Many Relationships among Urban Spatio-Temporal Data Sets 2016 SIGMOD 8.9438447e-05
2,162 DIFF: A Relational Interface for Large-Scale Data Explanation 2019 VLDB 8.9344773e-05
2,222 Explaining Query Answers with Explanation-Ready Databases 2016 VLDB 8.8106741e-05
2,318 Causal Relational Learning 2020 SIGMOD 8.6491185e-05
2,372 SCODED: Statistical Constraint Oriented Data Error Detection 2020 SIGMOD 8.5575299e-05
2,600 Complaint-driven Training Data Debugging for Query 2.0 2020 SIGMOD 8.2346824e-05
2,614 Database Repairs and Consistent Query Answering: Origins and Further Developments 2019 PODS 8.2221507e-05
2,687 Data X-Ray: A Diagnostic Tool for Data Errors 2015 SIGMOD 8.1271333e-05
4,063 The Complexity of Resilience and Responsibility for Self-Join-Free Conjunctive Queries 2016 VLDB 6.8215087e-05
4,684 Provenance for Natural Language Queries 2017 VLDB 6.4692258e-05
4,741 Going Beyond Provenance: Explaining Query Answers with Pattern-based Counterbalances 2019 SIGMOD 6.4411456e-05
4,750 New Results for the Complexity of Resilience for Binary Conjunctive Queries with Self-Joins 2020 PODS 6.4344094e-05
4,829 QFix: Diagnosing Errors through Query Histories 2017 SIGMOD 6.3887613e-05
4,842 High-Level Why-Not Explanations using Ontologies 2015 PODS 6.3828247e-05
4,849 Explaining Wrong Queries Using Small Examples 2019 SIGMOD 6.3794032e-05
4,920 Efficient Answering of Historical What-if Queries 2022 SIGMOD 6.3514733e-05
4,984 XInsight: eXplainable Data Analysis Through The Lens of Causality 2023 SIGMOD 6.325863e-05
5,152 CAPE: Explaining Outliers by Counterbalancing 2019 VLDB 6.2498545e-05
5,179 Explainable AI: Foundations, Applications, Opportunities for Data Management Research 2022 SIGMOD 6.2382214e-05
5,251 Enabling SQL-based Training Data Debugging for Federated Learning 2022 VLDB 6.2092359e-05
5,533 Putting Things into Context: Rich Explanations for Query Answers using Join Graphs 2021 SIGMOD 6.0906707e-05
5,555 Sommelier: Curating DNN Models for the Masses 2022 SIGMOD 6.0829894e-05
6,029 Perturbation Analysis of Database Queries 2016 VLDB 5.9085518e-05
6,438 Summarized Causal Explanations For Aggregate Views 2024 SIGMOD 5.7826256e-05
6,488 Approximate Summaries for Why and Why-not Provenance 2020 VLDB 5.7659318e-05
6,602 Explain3D: Explaining Disagreements in Disjoint Datasets 2019 VLDB 5.7376131e-05
6,703 Toward Interpretable and Actionable Data Analysis with Explanations and Causality 2022 VLDB 5.7031717e-05
6,712 Selective Provenance for Datalog Programs Using Top-K Queries 2015 VLDB 5.70009e-05
6,734 On Multiple Semantics for Declarative Database Repairs 2020 SIGMOD 5.6919385e-05
7,010 Video-zilla: An Indexing Layer for Large-Scale Video Analytics 2022 SIGMOD 5.6195953e-05
7,030 Explaining Inference Queries with Bayesian Optimization 2021 VLDB 5.6150695e-05
7,235 Hypothetical Reasoning via Provenance Abstraction 2019 SIGMOD 5.5765963e-05
7,385 Aggregated Deletion Propagation for Counting Conjunctive Query Answers 2021 VLDB 5.5361635e-05
7,422 A Unified Approach for Resilience and Causal Responsibility with Integer Linear Programming (ILP) and LP Relaxations 2023 SIGMOD 5.5299903e-05
7,513 ExplainED: Explanations for EDA Notebooks 2020 VLDB 5.5040697e-05
7,709 Interactive Query Explanations Using Fine Grained Provenance 2022 SIGMOD 5.4719078e-05
8,360 FEDEX: An Explainability Framework for Data Exploration Steps 2022 VLDB 5.3456868e-05
8,490 Provenance-based Data Skipping 2022 VLDB 5.3302146e-05
8,769 Is Integer Linear Programming All You Need for Deletion Propagation? A Unified and Practical Approach for Generalized Deletion Propagation 2025 VLDB 5.2811408e-05
8,890 DPXPlain: Privately Explaining Aggregate Query Answers 2023 VLDB 5.2542808e-05
9,023 LensXPlain: Visualizing and Explaining Contributing Subsets for Aggregate Query Answers 2019 VLDB 5.2349965e-05
9,066 NLC: Search Correlated Window Pairs on Long Time Series 2022 VLDB 5.226711e-05
9,069 Understanding Queries by Conditional Instances 2022 SIGMOD 5.2265129e-05
9,241 Causal DAG Summarization 2025 VLDB 5.2032182e-05
9,604 Equivalence-Invariant Algebraic Provenance for Hyperplane Update Queries 2020 SIGMOD 5.1534211e-05
9,891 TSExplain: Surfacing Evolving Explanations for Time Series 2021 SIGMOD 5.1145101e-05
9,957 Fair and Actionable Causal Prescription Ruleset 2025 SIGMOD 5.1014161e-05
10,028 CaJaDE: Explaining Query Results by Augmenting Provenance with Context 2022 VLDB 5.0910813e-05
10,189 Discovering Top-k Relevant and Diversified Rules 2024 SIGMOD 5.0628015e-05
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Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

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