Towards a Holistic Integration of Spreadsheets with Databases: A Scalable Storage Engine for Presentational Data Management (original) (raw)

Towards unifying spreadsheets with databases for ad-hoc interactive data management at scale

2018

We are witnessing the increasing availability of data across a spectrum of domains, necessitating the interactive ad-hoc management and analysis of this data, in order to put it to use. Unfortunately, interactive ad-hoc management of very large datasets presents a host of challenges, ranging from performance to interface usability. This thesis introduces a new research direction of manipulation of large datasets using an interactive interface and makes several steps towards this direction. In particular, we develop DataSpread, a tool that enables users to work with arbitrary large datasets via a direct manipulation interface. DataSpread holistically unifies spreadsheets and relational databases to leverage the benefits of both. However, this holistic integration is not trivial due to the differences in the architecture and ideologies of the two paradigms: spreadsheets and databases. We have built a prototype of DataSpread, which, in addition to motivating the underlying challenges, ...

Supporting the Spreadsheet Idea for Interactive Database Applications

IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, 2010

Data base applications allow the analysis of complex and large data. There are many analysis functions showing different relations between the data. End users have often new requirements to see data and relations which can not be shown by the existing analysis software. They need possibilities to create new user interfaces to fit their requirements. Generally, users don't have programming knowledge and cannot wait until the development department has specified the corresponding software. They need a tool which can easily and quick produce corresponding results. The tool must allow navigating via complex data structures of data bases. This paper discusses a tool that allows end users to specify interactive applications like spreadsheets. The tool supports OLAP applications and is based on the Qt Designer.

Scaling up to Billions of Cells with DATASPREAD : Supporting Large Spreadsheets with Databases

2017

Spreadsheet software is the tool of choice for ad-hoc tabular data management, manipulation, querying, and visualization with adoption by billions of users. However, spreadsheets are not scalable, unlike database systems. We develop DATASPREAD, a system that holistically unifies databases and spreadsheets with a goal to work with massive spreadsheets: DATASPREAD retains all of the advantages of spreadsheets, including ease of use, ad-hoc analysis and visualization capabilities, and a schema-free nature, while also adding the scalability and collaboration abilities of traditional relational databases. We design DATASPREAD with a spreadsheet front-end and a regular relational database back-end. To integrate spreadsheets and databases, in this paper, we develop a storage and indexing engine for spreadsheet data. We first formalize and study the problem of representing and manipulating spreadsheet data within a relational database. We demonstrate that identifying the optimal representat...

Spreadsheet as a relational database engine

Proceedings of the 2010 international conference on Management of data - SIGMOD '10, 2010

Spreadsheets are among the most commonly used applications for data management and analysis. Perhaps they are even among the most widely used computer applications of all kinds. However, the spreadsheet paradigm of computation still lacks sufficient analysis.

From spreadsheets to relational databases and back

… of the 2009 ACM SIGPLAN workshop …, 2009

This paper presents techniques and tools to transform spreadsheets into relational databases and back. A set of data refinement rules is introduced to map a tabular datatype into a relational database schema. Having expressed the transformation of the two data models as data refinements, we obtain for free the functions that migrate the data. We use well-known relational database techniques to optimize and query the data. Because data refinements define bidirectional transformations we can map such database back to an optimized spreadsheet. We have implemented the data refinement rules and we have constructed tools to manipulate, optimize and refactor Excel-like spreadsheets.

SpreadDB: Spreadsheet-Based User Interface for Querying and Updating Data of External Databases

Spreadsheet software is a software application capable of organizing, storing and analyzing data in tabular form. However, it has many limitations such as poor performance on large data sets, and lack of efficient and secured data sharing. In order to overcome these limitations, many organizations promote their users to store their data into databases. However, databases lack in the ease of use since they request database users to use SQL which is a standard language for querying and editing information stored in the databases. Since SQL is difficult for many end users to learn, database utilization of some parts of organizations does not progress. In order to relief users' burden of learning SQL, we propose SpreadDB which is a spreadsheet-based user interface for querying and updating database data. SpreadDB enables users to design spreadsheet templates used to perform data query and data update. We also present security measures of SpreadDB that prevent unauthorized persons from accessing and modifying database data.

A Spreadsheet Client for Web Applications

2006

There is an increasing gap between web services and web applications. While web services communicate via typed interfaces (e.g., using WSDL and SOAP), many web applications still rely on untyped, manually programmed forms in the restricted HTML widget set. These limitations cause developers to resort to HTML with client-side scripting, resulting in applications that can be hard to maintain. The goal of our work is to close the gap and ease maintenance by providing a browser technology that relies on declarative specifications and supports a fully typed interaction model. To this end, we have implemented Spreans, a type-aware spreadsheet that edits hierarchical data, supports a rich widget set, and includes browser functionality by implementing an interface to web services. The use of Spreans as a browser replaces the main uses of client-side scripting (calculations, constraint checking, and UI embellishment) by declarative specification, thus simplifying maintenance.

RDF123: a mechanism to transform spreadsheets to RDF

2006

We describe RDF123, a highly flexible open-source tool for transforming spreadsheet data to RDF. Existing spreadsheet-to-rdf tools typically map only to star-shaped RDF graphs, ie each spreadsheet row is an instance, with each column representing a property. RDF123, on the other hand, allows users to define mappings to arbitrary graphs, thus allowing much richer spreadsheet semantics to be expressed. Further, each row in the spreadsheet can be mapped with a different RDF scheme. Two interfaces are available.

DATA-SPREAD: Unifying Databases and Spreadsheets

2015

Spreadsheet software is often the tool of choice for ad-hoc tabular data management, processing, and visualization, especially on tiny data sets. On the other hand, relational database systems offer sig-nificant power, expressivity, and efficiency over spreadsheet soft-ware for data management, while lacking in the ease of use and ad-hoc analysis capabilities. We demonstrate DATA-SPREAD, a data exploration tool that unifies databases and spreadsheets. DATA-SPREAD continues to offer a Microsoft Excel-based spreadsheet front-end, while in parallel managing all the data in a back-end database, specifically, Postgres. DATA-SPREAD retains all the ad-vantages of spreadsheets, including ease of use, ad-hoc analysis and visualization capabilities, and a schema-free nature, while also adding the advantages of traditional relational databases, such as scalability and the ability to use arbitrary SQL to import, filter, or join external or internal tables and have the results appear in the spre...

SpreadMash: A Spreadsheet-Based Interactive Browsing and Analysis Tool for Data Services

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2008

Spreadsheets are one of the most popular end-users programming environment. Although spreadsheets provide an interactive interface for data manipulation and analysis, they are mostly used today in data entry mode and not as interactive browsing tool for data stored in underlying data sources. In this paper, we present SpreadMash, a high-level language and tool for interactive data browsing and analysis for data services. The key innovation of SpreadMash is a repository of application building blocks called data widgets that characterize various data importation and presentation patterns in spreadsheets. Data widgets enable the separation of end-users tasks (composing data widgets) from the tasks of data architects (creating data abstractions and data widgets). Through a series of examples we illustrate how tasks that would be challenging in existing environments are facilitated by SpreadMash.