Expressive Query Construction through Direct Manipulation of Nested Relational Results
Name
Karger_Expressive query.pdf
Size
4.53 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
7c43d73987c6e08c6fbe7f7ee9ba226b
Author(s)
Bakke, Eirik
Karger, David R
Date Issued
June 2016
Journal
Proceedings of the 2016 International Conference on Management of Data - SIGMOD '16
Citation
Bakke, Eirik, and David R. Karger. “Expressive Query Construction through Direct Manipulation of Nested Relational Results.” Proceedings of the 2016 International Conference on Management of Data - SIGMOD ’16 (2016), San Francisco, CA, USA, 2016.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Despite extensive research on visual query systems, the standard way to interact with relational databases remains to be through SQL queries and tailored form interfaces. We consider three requirements to be essential to a successful alternative: (1) query specification through direct manipulation of results, (2) the ability to view and modify any part of the current query without departing from the direct manipulation interface, and (3) SQL-like expressiveness. This paper presents the first visual query system to meet all three requirements in a single design. By directly manipulating nested relational results, and using spreadsheet idioms such as formulas and filters, the user can express a relationally complete set of query operators plus calculation, aggregation, outer joins, sorting, and nesting, while always remaining able to track and modify the state of the complete query. Our prototype gives the user an experience of responsive, incremental query building while pushing all actual query processing to the database layer. We evaluate our system with formative and controlled user studies on 28 spreadsheet users; the controlled study shows our system significantly outperforming Microsoft Access on the System Usability Scale.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1145/2882903.2915210
