The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

In large organizations, frequently the database has a large and intricate schema, hence, formulating queries is cumbersome. In such organizations, users can benefit from finding relevant queries in the query log of the database -- queries that can serve as an initial example for query formulation, or queries that were written by experts and elucidate how to write the query in an optimized manner. In this work we describe a recommendation system that assists users by providing a query search capability over a repository of SQL queries. We distinguish between two types of search -- semantic search and syntactic search. In semantic search, queries are deemed similar if they were written for the same task. In syntactic search, queries are considered similar if they look similar to an ordinary user. We will illustrate these two types of similarity and the differences between them. We will present different methods to test similarity among queries, and experimental results that illustrate the effectiveness of our methods. Finally, we will demonstrate a recommendation system that assists users finding queries under each one of the two search semantics.