Coping with Incomplete Data: Recent Advances

International audienceHandling incomplete data in a correct manner is a notoriously hard problem in databases. Theoretical approaches rely on the computationally hard notion of certain answers, while practical solutions rely on ad hoc query evaluation techniques based on threevalued logic. Can we find a middle ground, and produce correct answers efficiently? The paper surveys results of the last few years motivated by this question. We reexamine the notion of certainty itself, and show that it is much more varied than previously thought. We identify cases when certain answers can be computed efficiently and, short of that, provide deterministic and probabilistic approximation schemes for them. We look at the role of three-valued logic as used in SQL query evaluation, and discuss the correctness of the choice, as well as the necessity of such a logic for producing query answers

Coping with Incomplete Data: Recent Advances

Handling incomplete data in a correct manner is a notoriously hard problem in databases. Theoretical approaches rely on the computationally hard notion of certain answers, while practical solutions rely on ad hoc query evaluation techniques based on three-valued logic. Can we find a middle ground, and produce correct answers efficiently? The paper surveys results of the last few years motivated by this question. We re-examine the notion of certainty itself, and show that it is much more varied than previously thought. We identify cases when certain answers can be computed efficiently and, short of that, provide deterministic and probabilistic approximation schemes for them. We look at the role of three-valued logic as used in SQL query evaluation, and discuss the correctness of the choice, as well as the necessity of such a logic for producing query answers

Troubles with Nulls, Views from the Users

International audienceIncomplete data, in the form of null values, has been extensively studied since the inception of the relational model in the 1970s. Anecdotally, one hears that the way in which SQL, the standard language for relational databases, handles nulls creates a myriad of problems in everyday applications of database systems. To the best of our knowledge, however, the actual shortcomings of SQL in this respect, as perceived by database practitioners, have not been systematically documented, and it is not known if existing research results can readily be used to address the practical challenges. Our goal is to collect and analyze the shortcomings of nulls and their treatment by SQL, and to re-evaluate existing research in this light. To this end, we designed and conducted a survey on the everyday usage of null values among database users. From the analysis of the results we reached two main conclusions. First, null values are ubiquitous and relevant in real-life scenarios, but SQL's features designed to deal with them cause multiple problems. The severity of these problems varies depending on the SQL features used, and they cannot be reduced to a single issue. Second, foundational research on nulls is misdirected and has been addressing problems of limited practical relevance. We urge the community to view the results of this survey as a way to broaden the spectrum of their researches and further bridge the theory-practice gap on null values

A Formalization of SQL with Nulls

SQL is the world's most popular declarative language, forming the basis of the multi-billion-dollar database industry. Although SQL has been standardized, the full standard is based on ambiguous natural language rather than formal specification. Commercial SQL implementations interpret the standard in different ways, so that, given the same input data, the same query can yield different results depending on the SQL system it is run on. Even for a particular system, mechanically checked formalization of all widely-used features of SQL remains an open problem. The lack of a well-understood formal semantics makes it very difficult to validate the soundness of database implementations. Although formal semantics for fragments of SQL were designed in the past, they usually did not support set and bag operations, nested subqueries, and, crucially, null values. Null values complicate SQL's semantics in profound ways analogous to null pointers or side-effects in other programming languages. Since certain SQL queries are equivalent in the absence of null values, but produce different results when applied to tables containing incomplete data, semantics which ignore null values are able to prove query equivalences that are unsound in realistic databases. A formal semantics of SQL supporting all the aforementioned features was only proposed recently. In this paper, we report about our mechanization of SQL semantics covering set/bag operations, nested subqueries, and nulls, written the Coq proof assistant, and describe the validation of key metatheoretic properties

SQL’s Three-Valued Logic and Certain Answers

SQL uses three-valued logic for evaluating queries on databases with nulls. The standard theoretical approach to evaluating queries on incomplete databases is to compute certain answers. While these two cannot coincide, due to a significant complexity mismatch, we can still ask whether the two schemes are related in any way. For instance, does SQL always produce answers we can be certain about? This is not so: SQL\u27s and certain answers semantics could be totally unrelated. We show, however, that a slight modification of the three-valued semantics for relational calculus queries can provide the required certainty guarantees. The key point of the new scheme is to fully utilize the three-valued semantics, and classify answers not into certain or non-certain, as was done before, but rather into certainly true, certainly false, or unknown. This yields relatively small changes to the evaluation procedure, which we consider at the level of both declarative (relational calculus) and procedural (relational algebra) queries. We also introduce a new notion of certain answers with nulls, which properly accounts for queries returning tuples containing null values

Querying Incomplete Numerical Data: Between Certain and Possible Answers

International audienc