Variational databases
Parisa Ataei, Arash Termehchy, Eric Walkingshaw · 2017
Data variations are prevalent in real-world applications. For example, software vendors handle variations in the business requirements, conventions, and environmental settings of a software product using hundreds of features each combination of which creates a different version of the product. In database-backed software, the database of each version may have a different schema and different content. Variations in the value and representation of each element in a dataset give rise to numerous variants in these applications. Users often would like to express information needs over all such variants. For example, a software vendor would like to perform common tests over all versions of its product, e.g., whether each relation in a relational database has a primary key. Hence, users need a query interface that hides the variational nature of the data and processes a query over all variations of a dataset. We propose a novel abstraction called a variational database that provides a compact and structured representation of general forms of data variations and enables users to query database variations easily.