Interactive Browsing and Navigation in Relational Databases

TL;DR

ETable introduces an interactive presentation model that simplifies constructing complex join queries in relational databases by allowing users to directly manipulate enriched tables, improving speed and usability.

Contribution

The paper presents ETable, a novel presentation data model enabling interactive, entity-relationship level database exploration through enriched tables, enhancing user query formulation.

Findings

Participants performed database tasks faster with ETable.

ETable was rated easier to learn by users.

User feedback was positive regarding ETable's usefulness.

Abstract

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.