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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 2784–2787Cite as

Preference Queries

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Synonyms

Ranking queries

Definition

A preference query is a query obtained by augmenting a database query with user-defined preferences (preference specification), so that the preference query returns not all the answers but only the best, most preferred answers. For example, given a binary preference relation, a winnow preference query may return all the undominated tuples belonging to the input (all the tuples to which no tuples in the input are preferred). As another example, given a numeric scoring function a preference Top-K query returns K answers, if available, with the highest scores. Note: Top-K queries are not considered in this article because they are covered in a separate article.

Historical Background

An early paper [1] viewed preference queries in the context of relational query relaxation. The answers satisfying the query condition would be the best; the answers obtained by progressively weakening the query condition would be less and less preferred. So in the absence...

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Recommended Reading

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, USA

    Jan Chomicki

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  1. Jan Chomicki
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jan Chomicki .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

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Chomicki, J. (2018). Preference Queries. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_80687

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