Title
A unified model for data and constraint repair
Abstract
Integrity constraints play an important role in data design. However, in an operational database, they may not be enforced for many reasons. Hence, over time, data may become inconsistent with respect to the constraints. To manage this, several approaches have proposed techniques to repair the data, by finding minimal or lowest cost changes to the data that make it consistent with the constraints. Such techniques are appropriate for the old world where data changes, but schemas and their constraints remain fixed. In many modern applications however, constraints may evolve over time as application or business rules change, as data is integrated with new data sources, or as the underlying semantics of the data evolves. In such settings, when an inconsistency occurs, it is no longer clear if there is an error in the data (and the data should be repaired), or if the constraints have evolved (and the constraints should be repaired). In this work, we present a novel unified cost model that allows data and constraint repairs to be compared on an equal footing. We consider repairs over a database that is inconsistent with respect to a set of rules, modeled as functional dependencies (FDs). FDs are the most common type of constraint, and are known to play an important role in maintaining data quality. We evaluate the quality and scalability of our repair algorithms over synthetic data and present a qualitative case study using a well-known real dataset. The results show that our repair algorithms not only scale well for large datasets, but are able to accurately capture and correct inconsistencies, and accurately decide when a data repair versus a constraint repair is best.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1109/ICDE.2011.5767833
ICDE
Keywords
Field
DocType
repair algorithm,data change,important role,constraint repair,data design,data repair,new data source,unified model,data quality,data evolves,synthetic data,data models,redundancy,data model,semantics,data integrity,computational modeling,maintenance engineering,integrity constraints,computer model,functional dependencies,databases
Data modeling,Data mining,Data quality,Operational database,Computer science,Data integrity,Synthetic data,Business rule,Database,Data efficiency,Scalability
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1084-4627
33
1.05
References 
Authors
12
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Fei Chiang125619.02
Renée J. Miller23545373.59