Mining Meaningful Keys and Foreign Keys with High Precision and Recall

Abstract

We demonstrate a next-generation Entity/Relationship (E/R) Profiler that mines meaningful key/foreign key relationships from a given data repository. Core novelties include a strict hierarchy of key variants ranging from candidate keys to SQL unique constraints that represent different ways to identify incomplete entities, a measure of orthogonality that separates accidental from meaningful keys, and algorithms for mining approximate keys for all these variants under different thresholds of arity, completeness, dirtiness, and orthogonality. We showcase the high precision and recall achieved by our tool and how it facilitates the users’ understanding which entity and referential integrity constraints govern their data.