A spreadsheet-based user interface for managing plural relationships in structured data

Abstract

A key feature of relational database applications is managing plural relationships-one-to-many and many-to-manybetween entities. However, since it is often infeasible to adopt or develop a new database application for any given schema at hand, information workers instead turn to spreadsheets, which lend themselves poorly to schemas requiring multiple related entity sets. In this paper, we propose to reduce the cost-usability gap between spreadsheets and tailor-made relational database applications by extending the spreadsheet paradigm to let the user establish relationships between rows in related worksheets as well as view and navigate the hierarchical cell structure that arises as a result. We present Related Worksheets, a spreadsheet-like prototype application, and evaluate it with a screencast-based user study on 36 Mechanical Turk workers. First-time users of our software were able to solve lookup-type query tasks with the same or higher accuracy as subjects using Microsoft Excel, in one case 40% faster on average.

Expressive Query Construction through Direct Manipulation of Nested Relational Results

“…This thesis includes material previously published at SIGMOD '16 [9] (Chapters 2 and 3), InfoVis '13 [9] (Chapters 2 and 5), and for this introduction, CHI '11 [10] and CIDR '11 [8]. All thesis content is by the author.…”

“…In diagram-based systems, the user manipulates queries for example through a schema tree or schema diagram, as in Query-by-Diagram (QBD) [6], Query-byBrowsing (QBB) [84], QURSED [81], App2You [66], Related Worksheets [10] and OptiqueVQS [94], or through a diagrammatic query plan, as in VisualTPL [27]. The diagram-based query building style is common in commercial tools-Microsoft Access, Navicat, pgAdmin, dbForge, Alteryx etc.…”

“…Queries that involve "complex aggregates, nesting, correlation, and several other features remain on a tall pedestal approachable only by the initiated" [51]. Simple report queries traversing one-to-many relationships in the database schema, such as retrieving "a list of parts, and for each part a list of suppliers and a list of open orders", are painful to define for programmers and largely inaccessible to end users [10].…”

Gestural query specification

“…We use publicly available datasets, Chinook (11 tables, 64 columns,15K tuples, 1MB) 4 and TPC-H (9 tables, 76 columns, 86K tuples, 15MB) 5 as the test databases 6 . We performed three user studies under procedures approved by our institutional review board 7 .…”

“…Solutions towards usable data interaction have ranged from innovations in the query paradigm such as natural language, example and output-driven querying [1,30,61,53] to query visualization [22,15], to user interface innovations in spreadsheet interfaces [7,6,38] and autocompletion [43]. Automated form generation [32,12] assists the process of creating and evolving queries for analytical use cases, while query recommendation [11,35,4] efforts using logs have focused on generating the queries themselves.…”