2025-09-18 - Paper on repairing a query to fulfill constraints on the query's result accepted at VLDB 2026
Repairing Queries to Fulfill Constraints
In many real-world scenarios, query results must satisfy domain-specific constraints. For instance, a minimum percentage of interview candidates selected based on their qualifications should be female or at least 25% of the vendors selected by a government agency have to be local. Such requirements can be expressed as constraints over an arithmetic combination of aggregates evaluated on the result of the query. Often it is not possible to just postprocess the outputs of the query as the query encodes a selection process that has to apply the same selection criteria to all inputs, e.g., vendors should be selected based on a fixed set of selection criteria that are applied to all job applicants.
In this work [1] lead by Shatha, Boris together with Shatha’s advisor Age from University of Southampton and former DBgroup member Seokki from University of Cincinnati study how to repair a query to fulfill such constraints by modifying the filter predicates of the query. We introduce a novel query repair technique that leverages bounds on sets of candidate solutions and interval arithmetic to efficiently prune the search space, enabling repairs for significantly more complex constraints than supported by the state-of-the-art including common fairness metrics and policies that apply to all query results holistically.
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Efficient Query Repair for Aggregate Constraints
Shatha Algarni, Boris Glavic, Seokki Lee and Adriane Chapman
Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment. (2025).details@article{AG25, author = {Algarni, Shatha and Glavic, Boris and Lee, Seokki and Chapman, Adriane}, title = {Efficient Query Repair for Aggregate Constraints}, journal = {Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment}, year = {2025}, venueshort = {{PVLDB}}, istoappear = true, keywords = {Provenance; Fairness} }