Interactive Browsing and Navigation in Relational Databases

Although researchers have devoted considerable attention to helping database users formulate queries, many users still find it challenging to specify queries that involve joining tables. To help users construct join queries for exploring relational databases, we propose ETable, a novel presentation data model that provides users with a presentation-level interactive view. This view compactly presents one-to-many and many-to-many relationships within a single enriched table by allowing a cell to contain a set of entity references. Users can directly interact with this enriched table to incrementally construct complex queries and navigate databases on a conceptual entity-relationship level. In a user study, participants performed a range of database querying tasks faster with ETable than with a commercial graphical query builder. Subjective feedback about ETable was also positive. All participants found that ETable was easier to learn and helpful for exploring databases.

• Publication year

  2016

• Venue

  Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment

• Publication date

  2016-03-08

• Fields of study

  Computer Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.14778/2994509.2994520arXiv 1603.02371
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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