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.
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Notes
- 1.
This is essentially the syntax for SQL’s create table commands.
- 2.
as stated in their abstract; despite efforts, we were not able to obtain the full paper.
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Ma, W., Keet, C.M., Oldford, W., Toman, D., Weddell, G. (2018). The Utility of the Abstract Relational Model and Attribute Paths in SQL. In: Faron Zucker, C., Ghidini, C., Napoli, A., Toussaint, Y. (eds) Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management. EKAW 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11313. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03667-6_13
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