We present {\em smart drill-down}, an operator for interactively exploring a
relational table to discover and summarize "interesting" groups of tuples. Each
group of tuples is described by a {\em rule}. For instance, the rule (a,b,⋆,1000) tells us that there are a thousand tuples with value a in the
first column and b in the second column (and any value in the third column).
Smart drill-down presents an analyst with a list of rules that together
describe interesting aspects of the table. The analyst can tailor the
definition of interesting, and can interactively apply smart drill-down on an
existing rule to explore that part of the table. We demonstrate that the
underlying optimization problems are {\sc NP-Hard}, and describe an algorithm
for finding the approximately optimal list of rules to display when the user
uses a smart drill-down, and a dynamic sampling scheme for efficiently
interacting with large tables. Finally, we perform experiments on real datasets
on our experimental prototype to demonstrate the usefulness of smart drill-down
and study the performance of our algorithms
