The Utility of the Abstract Relational Model and Attribute Paths in SQL

Ma, Weicong and Keet, C. Maria and Olford, Wayne and Toman, David and Weddell, Grant (2018) The Utility of the Abstract Relational Model and Attribute Paths in SQL, Proceedings of 21st International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW'18)., 12-16 November 2018, Nancy, France, Springer.

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Abstract

It is well-known that querying information is difficult for domain experts, for they are not familiar with querying actual relational schemata due to the notions of primary and foreign keys and the various ways of representing and storing information in a relational database. To overcome these problems, the Abstract Relational Model and the query language, SQLP, have been proposed. They are the theoretical foundations and ensure that explicit primary and foreign keys are hidden from the user's view and that queries can be expressed more compactly. In this paper we evaluate these theoretical advantages with user studies that compare SQLP to plain SQL as the baseline. The experiments show significant statistical evidence that SQLP indeed requires less time for understanding and authoring queries, with no loss in accuracy. Considering the positive results, we develop a method to reverse engineer legacy relational schemata into abstract relational ones.

Item Type: Conference paper
Uncontrolled Keywords: SQL, Relational Model, path queries
Subjects: Computing methodologies > Artificial intelligence
Information systems
Information systems > Data management systems
Alternate Locations: http://www.meteck.org/files/ersqlpathEKAW18.pdf
Date Deposited: 09 Nov 2018
Last Modified: 10 Oct 2019 15:31
URI: http://pubs.cs.uct.ac.za/id/eprint/1276

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