Characterizing and Verifying Queries Via CINSGEN

Example database instances can be very helpful in understanding complex queries. Different examples may illustrate alternative situations in which answers emerge in the query results and can be useful for testing. Examples can also help reveal semantic differences between queries that are supposed to be equivalent, e.g., when students try to understand how their queries behave differently from a reference solution, or when programmers try to pinpoint mistakes inadvertently introduced by rewrites meant to improve readability or performance. In this paper, we propose to demonstrate CinsGen, a system that can characterize queries and help distinguish between two queries. Given a query, CinsGen generates minimal conditional instances (c-instances) that satisfy it. In turn, each c-instance is a generalization of multiple database instances, yielding a compact representation. Thus, using CinsGen enables users to obtain a comprehensive and compact view of all scenarios that satisfy a specified query, allowing for query characterization or distinction between two queries.