ABSTRACT
Database researchers have striven to improve the capability of a database in terms of both performance and functionality. We assert that the usability of a database is as important as its capability. In this paper, we study why database systems today are so difficult to use. We identify a set of five pain points and propose a research agenda to address these. In particular, we introduce a presentation data model and recommend direct data manipulation with a schema later approach. We also stress the importance of provenance and of consistency across presentation models.
Supplemental Material
- R. Abraham. FoXQ - XQuery by forms. In IEEE Symposium on Human Centric Computing Languages and Environments, 2003. Google ScholarDigital Library
- S. Agrawal, S. Chaudhuri, and G. Das. DBXplorer: A System for Keyword-Based Search over Relational Databases. In ICDE, 2002.Google ScholarDigital Library
- S. Agrawal, S. Chaudhuri, L. Kollar, A. Marathe, V. Narasayya, and M. Syamala. Database Tuning Advisor for Microsoft SQL Server 2005. In VLDB, 2004.Google Scholar
- S. Amer-Yahia, L. V. S. Lakshmanan, and S. Pandit. FleXPath: Flexible Structure and Full-Text Querying for XML. In SIGMOD, 2004. Google ScholarDigital Library
- I. Androutsopoulos, G. Ritchie, and P. Thanisch. Natural Language Interfaces to Databases -- an introduction. Journal of Language Engineering, 1(1):29--81, 1995.Google ScholarCross Ref
- D. Beech. Can SQL3 Be Simplified? Database Programming and Design, 10(1):46--50, Jan 1997.Google Scholar
- G. Bell and J. Gemmell. A Digital Life, 2007.Google Scholar
- O. Benjelloun, A. D. Sarma, A. Halevy, and J. Widom. ULDBs: Databases with Uncertainty and Lineage. In VLDB, 2006. Google ScholarDigital Library
- F. Benzi, D. Maio, and S. Rizzi. Visionary: A Viewpoint-based Visual Language for Querying Relational Databases. Journal of Visual Languages and Computing, 10(2), 1999.Google ScholarCross Ref
- D. Bhagwat, L. Chiticariu, W. C. Tan, and G. Vijayvargiya. An Annotation Management System for Relational Databases. In VLDB, 2005. Google ScholarDigital Library
- G. Bhalotia, A. Hulgeri, C. Nakhe, S. Chakrabarti, and S. Sudarshan. Keyword Searching and Browsing in Databases using BANKS. In ICDE, 2002. Google ScholarDigital Library
- A. Blum. Microsoft English Query 7.5: Automatic Extraction of Semantics from Relational Databases and OLAP Cubes. In VLDB, 1999. Google ScholarDigital Library
- D. Braga, A. Campi, and S. Ceri. XQBE (XQuery By Example): A Visual Interface to the Standard XML Query Language. ACM Trans. Database Syst., 30(2), 2005. Google ScholarDigital Library
- S. Brin and L. Page. The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine. Computer Networks, 30(1-7):107--117, 1998. Google ScholarDigital Library
- A. Brown, L. Chung, W. Kakes, C. Ling, and D. Patterson. Experience With Evaluating Human-Assisted Recovery Processes. Dependable Systems and Networks, pages 405--410, 2004. Google ScholarDigital Library
- A. B. Brown, L. C. Chung, and D. A. Patterson. Including the Human Factor in Dependability Benchmarks. In DSN Workshop on Dependability Benchmarking, 2002.Google Scholar
- P. Buneman, A. Chapman, and J. Cheney. Provenance Management in Curated Databases. In SIGMOD, 2006. Google ScholarDigital Library
- P. Buneman, S. Khanna, and W.-C. Tan. Why and Where: A Characterization of Data Provenance. In ICDT, 2001. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Business Objects, Inc. Crystal Xcelsius, http://xcelsius.com.Google Scholar
- R. Butterworth, A. Blandford, and D. Duke. Using Formal Models to Explore Display-Based Usability Issues. Journa of Visual Languages and Computing, 10(5), 1999.Google Scholar
- D. Carmel, Y. S. Maarek, M. Mandelbrod, Y. Mass, and A. Soffer. Searching XML Documents via XML Fragments. In SIGIR, 2003. Google ScholarDigital Library
- I. Ceaparu, J. Lazar, K. Bessiere, J. Robinson, and B. Shneiderman. Determining Causes and Severity of End-User Frustration. International Journal of Human Computer Interaction, 17(3), 2004.Google Scholar
- S. Chaudhuri and G. Weikum. Rethinking Database System Architecture: Towards a Self-Tuning, RISC-style Database System. In VLDB, 2000. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Z. Chen and T. Li. Addressing Diverse User Preferences in SQL-Query-Result Navigation. In SIGMOD, 2007. Google ScholarDigital Library
- K. Cheung and J. Hunter. Provenance Explorer - Customized Provenance Views Using Semantic Inferencing. In ISWC, 2006. Google ScholarDigital Library
- J. Choobineh, M. V. Mannino, and V. P. Tseng. A Form-Based Approach for Database Analysis and Design. CACM, 35(2), 1992. Google ScholarDigital Library
- S. Cohen, S. C. Boulakia, and S. Davidson. Towards a Model of Scientific Workflows and User Views. In DILS, 2006.Google ScholarDigital Library
- S. Cohen, Y. Kanza, Y. Kogan, Y. Sagiv, W. Nutt, and A. Serebrenik. EquiX--A Search and Query Language for XML. JASIST, 53(6), 2002. Google ScholarDigital Library
- S. Cohen, J. Mamou, Y. Kanza, and Y. Sagiv. XSEarch: A Semantic Search Engine for XML. In VLDB, 2003. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Y. Cui and J. Widom. Lineage Tracing for General Data Warehouse Transformations. In VLDB, 2001. Google ScholarDigital Library
- DabbleDB. http://www.dabbledb.com/.Google Scholar
- C. J. Date. Database Usability. In SIGMOD, New York, NY, USA, 1983. ACM Press.Google Scholar
- X. Dong and A. Halevy. A Platform for Personal Information Management and Integration. In CIDR, 2005.Google Scholar
- A. Doubleday, M. Ryan, M. Springett, and A. Sutcliffe. A Comparison of Usability Techniques for Evaluating Design. In DIS, 1997. Google ScholarDigital Library
- A. Elkiss, Y. Li, and H. V. Jagadish. Ranked Relatedness Queries for XML Databases. Technical report, University of Michigan, 2007.Google Scholar
- D. W. Embley. NFQL: The Natural Forms Query Language. ACM Trans. Database Syst., 1989. Google ScholarDigital Library
- M. Erwig. A Visual Language for XML. In IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages, 2000. Google ScholarDigital Library
- J. Frew and R. Bose. Earth System Science Workbench: A Data Management Infrastructure for Earth Science Products. In SSDBM, 2001. Google ScholarDigital Library
- A. Furtado and M. Casanova. Updating relational views. In Query Processing in Database Systems, 1985.Google ScholarCross Ref
- R. Goldman, N. Shivakumar, S. Venkatasubramanian, and H. Garcia-Molina. Proximity Search in Databases. In VLDB, 1998. Google ScholarDigital Library
- L. Guo, F. Shao, C. Botev, and J. Shanmugasundaram. XRANK: Ranked Keyword Search over XML Documents. In SIGMOD, 2003. Google ScholarDigital Library
- A. Y. Halevy, M. J. Franklin, and D. Maier. Principles of Dataspace Systems. In PODS, 2006. Google ScholarDigital Library
- P. Hanrahan. VizQL: A Language for Query, Analysis and Visualization. SIGMOD, pages 721--721, 2006. Google ScholarDigital Library
- E. Hatcher and O. Gospodnetic. Lucene in Action. Manning Publications, 2004. Google ScholarDigital Library
- T. Haveliwala. Topic-Sensitive PageRank: A Context-Sensitive Ranking Algorithm for Web Search. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 15(4):784--796, 2003. Google ScholarDigital Library
- T. Haveliwala, S. Kamvar, and G. Jeh. An Analytical Comparison of Approaches to Personalizing PageRank, Preprint, June 2003.Google Scholar
- V. Hristidis and Y. Papakonstantinou. DISCOVER: Keyword Search in Relational Databases. In VLDB, 2002. Google ScholarDigital Library
- J. J. Inman, J. S. Dyer, and J. Jia. A Generalized Utility Model of Disappointement and Regret Effects on Post-Choice Valuation. Marketing Science, 16(2):97--111, 1997.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Y. E. Ioannidis and S. Viglas. Conversational Querying. Inf. Syst, 31(1):33--56, 2006. Google ScholarDigital Library
- H. V. Jagadish, S. Al-Khalifa, A. Chapman, L. V. Lakshmanan, A. Nierman, S. Paparizos, J. M. Patel, D. Srivastava, N. Wiwatwattana, Y. Wu, and C. Yu. TIMBER: A Native XML Database. VLDB Journal, 11(4):274--291, 2002. Google ScholarDigital Library
- M. Jayapandian, A. Chapman, V. G. Tarcea, C. Yu, A. Elkiss, A. Ianni, B. Liu, A. Nandi, C. Santos, P. Andrews, B. Athey, D. States, and H. Jagadish. Michigan Molecular Interactions (MiMI): Putting the Jigsaw Puzzle Together. Nucleic Acids Research, pages D566--D571, Jan 2007.Google ScholarCross Ref
- T. S. Jayram, R. Krishnamurthy, S. Raghavan, S. Vaithyanathan, and H. Zhu. Avatar Information Extraction System. IEEE Data Eng. Bull., 29(1):40--48, 2006.Google Scholar
- G. Jeh and J. Widom. Scaling Personalized Web Search. WWW, pages 271--279, 2003. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Y. Kanza and Y. Sagiv. Flexible Queries Over Semistructured Data. In PODS, 2001. Google ScholarDigital Library
- J. F. Kelley. An Iterative Design Methodology for User-Friendly Natural Language Office Information Applications. ACM Trans. Database Syst., 2(1), 1984. Google ScholarDigital Library
- G. Koutrika and Y. Ioannidis. Personalization of Queries in Database Systems. In ICDE, 2004. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Y. Li, I. Chaudhuri, H. Yang, S. Singh, and H. V. Jagadish. DaNaLIX: a Domain-adaptive Natural Language Interface for Querying XML. In SIGMOD, 2007. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Y. Li, H. Yang, and H. V. Jagadish. NaLIX: an Interactive Natural Language Interface for Querying XML. In SIGMOD, 2005. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Y. Li, H. Yang, and H. V. Jagadish. Constructing a Generic Natural Language Interface for an XML Database. In EDBT, 2006. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Y. Li, H. Yang, and H. V. Jagadish. Term Disambiguation in Natural Language Query for XML. In FQAS, 2006. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Y. Li, H. Yang, and H. V. Jagadish. NaLIX: A Generic Natural Language Search Environment for XML Data. acmtds, accepted.Google Scholar
- Y. Li, C. Yu, and H. V. Jagadish. Schema-Free XQuery. In VLDB, 2004. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Y. Li, C. Yu, and H. V. Jagadish. Enabling Schema-Free XQuery with Meaningful Query Focus. VLDB Journal, in press. Google ScholarDigital Library
- S. Lightstone, G. M. Lohman, P. J. Haas, et al. MakingDB2 Products Self-Managing: Strategies and Experiences. IEEE Data Eng. Bull, 29(3):16--23, 2006.Google Scholar
- J. Madhavan, S. Jeffery, S. Cohen, X. Dong, D. Ko, C. Yu, and A. Halevy. Web-scale Data Integration: You Can Only Afford to Pay As You Go. In CIDR, 2007.Google Scholar
- V. Markl, G. M. Lohman, and V. Raman. LEO: An Autonomic Query Optimizer for DB2. IBM Systems Journal, 42(1):98--106, 2003. Google ScholarDigital Library
- I. Mervielde. The Need for Closure and the Spontaneous Use of Complex and Simple Cognitive Structures. The Journal of Social Psychology, 2003.Google Scholar
- K. Mitchell and J. Kennedy. DRIVE: An Environment for the Organized Construction of User-Interfaces to Databases. In Interfaces to Databases (IDS-3), 1996. Google ScholarDigital Library
- B. Mobasher, R. Cooley, and J. Srivastava. Automatic Personalization Based on Web Usage Mining. CACM, 43(8):142--151, 2000. Google ScholarDigital Library
- A. Motro. Query generalization: A method for interpreting null answers. In Workshop on Expert Database Systems, 1986.Google Scholar
- P. Mukhopadhyay and Y. Papakonstantinou. Mixing Querying and Navigation in MIX. In ICDE, 2002.Google ScholarCross Ref
- S. Munroe, S. Miles, L. Moreau, and J. Vázquez-Salceda. PrIMe: A Software Engineering Methodology for Developing Provenance-Aware Applications. In SEM, 2006. Google ScholarDigital Library
- N. Murray, N. Paton, and C. Goble. Kaleidoquery: A Visual Query Language for Object Databases. In Advanced Visual Interfaces, 1998. Google ScholarDigital Library
- A. Nandi and H. V. Jagadish. Assisted Querying using Instant-Response Interfaces. In SIGMOD, 2007. Google ScholarDigital Library
- A. Nandi and H. V. Jagadish. Effective Phrase Prediction. Technical report, University of Michigan, 2007.Google Scholar
- OpenRecord. http://www.openrecord.org/.Google Scholar
- D. Oppenheimer. The Importance of Understanding Distributed System Configuration. System Administrators are Users, Too: Designing Workspaces for Managing Internet-scale Systems, CHI 2003 Workshop, 2003.Google Scholar
- C. Pancerella, J. Hewson, W. Koegler, et al. Metadata in the Collaboratory for Multi-Scale Chemical Science. In Dublin Core Conference, 2003. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Y. Papakonstantinou, M. Petropoulos, and V. Vassalos. QURSED: Querying and Reporting Semistructured Data. In SIGMOD, 2002. Google ScholarDigital Library
- M. Perkowitz and O. Etzioni. Adaptive Web Sites. CACM, 43(8):152--158, 2000. Google ScholarDigital Library
- A. Pfeiffer. Why Features Don't Matter Anymore: The New Laws of Digital Technology. Ubiquity, 7(7), Feburary 2006. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Pilot Software. http://www.pilotsoftware.com/.Google Scholar
- A.-M. Popescu, O. Etzioni, and H. A. Kautz. Towards a Theory of Natural Language Interfaces to Databases. In IUI, 2003. Google ScholarDigital Library
- R. E. Sabin and T. K. Yap. Integrating Information Retrieval Techniques with Traditional DB Methods in a Web-Based Database Browser. In SAC, 1998. Google ScholarDigital Library
- A. Sengupta and A. Dillon. Query by Templates: A Generalized Approach for Visual Query Formulation for Text Dominated Databases. In ADL, 1997. Google ScholarDigital Library
- P. Shannon et al. Cytoscape: A Software Environment for Integrated Models of Biomolecular Interaction Networks. Genome Res, 13(11):2498--504, 2003.Google ScholarCross Ref
- B. Sheneiderman. Improving the Human Factors Aspect of Database Interactions. ACM Trans. Database Syst., 3(4),1978. Google ScholarDigital Library
- S. M. Shugan. The Cost of Thinking. Journal of Consumer Research, 7(2):99--111, 1980.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Y. Simmhan, B. Plale, and D. Gannon. A Survey of Data Provenance in E-Science. SIGMOD Record, 34(3):31--36, 2005. Google ScholarDigital Library
- S. Sinha, K. Bowers, and S. A. Mamrak. Accessing a Medical Database using WWW-Based User Interfaces. Technical report, Ohio State University, 1998.Google Scholar
- C. Soules, S. Shah, G. R. Ganger, and B. D. Noble. It's Time to Bite the User Study Bullet. Technical report, University of Michigan, 2007.Google Scholar
- A. Sutcliffe, M. Ryan, A. Doubleday, and M. Springett. Model Mismatch Analysis: Towards a Deeper Explanation of Users' Usability Problems. Behavior & Information Technology, 19(1), 2000.Google Scholar
- A. Tornqvist, C. Nelson, and M. Johnsson. XML and Objects - The Future for E-Forms on the Web. In WETICE. IEEE Computer Society, 1999. Google ScholarDigital Library
- A. I. Wasserman. User Software Engineering and the Design of Interactive Systems. In ICSE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, 1981. IEEE Press. Google ScholarDigital Library
- J. Widom. Trio: A System for Integrated Management of Data, Accuracy, and Lineage. In CIDR, 2005.Google Scholar
- A. Woodruff and M. Stonebraker. Supporting Fine-grained Data Lineage in a Database Visualization Environment. In ICDE, 1997. Google ScholarDigital Library
- C. Yu and H. V. Jagadish. Schema Summarization. In VLDB, 2006. Google ScholarDigital Library
- C. Yu and H. V. Jagadish. Querying Complex Structured Databases. Technical report, University of Michigan, 2007.Google Scholar
- W. Yuan. End-User Searching Behavior in Information Retrieval: A Longitudinal Study. JASIST, 48(3), 1997. Google ScholarDigital Library
- M. M. Zloof. Query-by-Example: the Invocation and Definition of Tables and Forms. In VLDB, 1975.Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Making database systems usable
Recommendations
An object-oriented prototype for a geophysical database
SSST '95: Proceedings of the 27th Southeastern Symposium on System Theory (SSST'95)Database management systems (DBMSs) are being used in a wide variety of domains to handle many types of data. Scientific data pose a special challenge to DBMSs due to their volume and complex nature. The object-oriented model has many additional ...
Database Research: Are We at a Crossroad? Reflection on NoSQL
NBIS '12: Proceedings of the 2012 15th International Conference on Network-Based Information SystemsThe demand to process large sets of data has increased in the last few years from both the scientific and business community. To serve this demand, a number of new databases have been introduced that are not based on relational models. This group of ...
Comments