DataLens: making a good first impression
Proceedings of the 2009 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of data
Using trees to depict a forest
Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment
Spreadsheet as a relational database engine
Proceedings of the 2010 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of data
ASSET queries: a declarative alternative to MapReduce
ACM SIGMOD Record
Spreadsheet-based complex data transformation
Proceedings of the 20th ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management
DNIS'11 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Databases in Networked Information Systems
Situational data integration with data services and nested table
Service Oriented Computing and Applications
Automatic web spreadsheet data extraction
Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Semantic Search Over the Web
Senbazuru: a prototype spreadsheet database management system
Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment
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A spreadsheet-like "direct manipulation" interface is more intuitive for many non-technical database users compared to traditional alternatives, such as visual query builders. The construction of such a direct manipulation interfacemay appear straightforward, but there are some significant challenges. First, individual direct manipulation operations cannot be too complex, so expressive power has to be achieved through composing (long) sequences of small operations. Second, all intermediate results are visible to the user, so grouping and ordering are material after every small step. Third, users often find the need to modify previously specified queries. Since manipulations are specified one step at a time, there is no actual queryexpression to modify. Suitable means must be provided to address this need. Fourth, the order in which manipulations are performed by the user should not affect the results obtained, to avoid user confusion. We address the aforementioned challenges by designing a new spreadsheet algebra that: i) operates on recursively grouped multi-sets, ii) contains a selectively designed set of operators capable of expressing at least all single-block SQL queries and can be intuitively implemented in a spreadsheet, iii) enables query modification by the notion of modifiable query state, and iv) requires no ordering in unary data manipulation operators since they are all designed to commute. We built a prototype implementation of the spreadsheet algebra and show, through user studies with non-technical subjects, that the resultant query interface is easier to use than a standard commercial visual query builder.