Explaining Missing Answers to SPJUA Queries

Summary: Missing-answer explanations for SPJUA queries via a source-data-driven framework; algorithms yield correct, finite, and, when possible, minimal explanation sets. Artemis implements this approach for query debugging; experiments show explanations produced quickly enough for practical developer use. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: hfb7b8027ca2e0157
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2010
Pagerank: 9.0884616e-05
Overall Rank: 2,069 | 86.10%
DOI: 10.14778/1920841.1920869

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Melanie Herschel (University of Tübingen)
2. Mauricio A. Hernández (IBM)

BibTeX Citation

@article{herschel_vldb10,
        title = {{Explaining Missing Answers to SPJUA Queries}},
        author = {Herschel, Melanie and Hernández, Mauricio A.},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '10},
        volume = {3},
        number = {1},
        doi = {10.14778/1920841.1920869},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/1920841.1920869},
        year = {2010}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 20 of 20 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
2,054	Messing Up with BART: Error Generation for Evaluating Data-Cleaning Algorithms	2016	VLDB	9.1158071e-05
2,458	Tracing Data Errors with View-Conditioned Causality	2011	SIGMOD	8.4334752e-05
2,505	Query-Oriented Data Cleaning with Oracles	2015	SIGMOD	8.3743595e-05
2,838	Data Provenance at Internet Scale: Architecture, Experiences, and the Road Ahead	2017	CIDR	7.9493532e-05
2,958	Answering Why-not Questions on Reverse Top-k Queries	2015	VLDB	7.80653e-05
4,063	The Complexity of Resilience and Responsibility for Self-Join-Free Conjunctive Queries	2016	VLDB	6.8215087e-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
4,825	Automatic Rule Refinement for Information Extraction	2010	VLDB	6.3907162e-05
4,849	Explaining Wrong Queries Using Small Examples	2019	SIGMOD	6.3794032e-05
5,000	Descriptive and Prescriptive Data Cleaning	2014	SIGMOD	6.3194405e-05
5,359	Why Not Yet: Fixing a Top-k Ranking that Is Not Fair to Individuals	2023	VLDB	6.1608586e-05
6,488	Approximate Summaries for Why and Why-not Provenance	2020	VLDB	5.7659318e-05
7,410	EFQ: Why-Not Answer Polynomials in Action	2015	VLDB	5.5322038e-05
8,546	Why Not Match: On Explanations of Event Pattern Queries	2021	SIGMOD	5.3174951e-05
8,890	DPXPlain: Privately Explaining Aggregate Query Answers	2023	VLDB	5.2542808e-05
9,069	Understanding Queries by Conditional Instances	2022	SIGMOD	5.2265129e-05
11,104	Smallest Synthetic Witnesses for Conjunctive Queries	2025	PODS	4.9769913e-05
12,095	SPARQL Rewriting: Towards Desired Results	2020	SIGMOD	4.9769913e-05
12,243	Provenance Summaries for Answers and Non-Answers	2018	VLDB	4.9769913e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 6 of 6 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
39	Efficiently Updating Materialized Views	1986	SIGMOD	0.00046583225
389	Why Not?	2009	SIGMOD	0.00019313101
392	Data Exchange: Getting to the Core	2003	PODS	0.00019215652
621	On the Provenance of Non-Answers to Queries over Extracted Data	2008	VLDB	0.0001548582
2,361	Artemis: A System for Analyzing Missing Answers	2009	VLDB	8.5732984e-05
4,270	On Preservation under Homomorphisms and Unions of Conjunctive Queries	2004	PODS	6.6909605e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	4,849	Explaining Wrong Queries Using Small Examples	2019	SIGMOD
2	621	On the Provenance of Non-Answers to Queries over Extracted Data	2008	VLDB
3	7,368	Weighted Distinct Sampling: Cardinality Estimation for SPJ Queries	2021	SIGMOD
4	671	A Formal Approach to Finding Explanations for Database Queries	2014	SIGMOD
5	4,662	Reverse Engineering SPJ-Queries from Examples	2017	PODS
6	5,533	Putting Things into Context: Rich Explanations for Query Answers using Join Graphs	2021	SIGMOD
7	1,273	Discovering Queries based on Example Tuples	2014	SIGMOD
8	7,884	To Not Miss the Forest for the Trees - A Holistic Approach for Explaining Missing Answers over Nested Data	2021	SIGMOD
9	791	How to ConQueR Why-Not Questions	2010	SIGMOD
10	2,361	Artemis: A System for Analyzing Missing Answers	2009	VLDB