Mragyati : A System for Keyword-based Searching in Databases

Abstract

The web, through many search engine sites, has popularized the keyword-based search paradigm, where a user can specify a string of keywords and expect to retrieve relevant documents, possibly ranked by their relevance to the query. Since a lot of information is stored in databases (and not as HTML documents), it is important to provide a similar search paradigm for databases, where users can query a database without knowing the database schema and database query languages such as SQL. In this paper, we propose such a database search system, which accepts a free-form query as a collection of keywords, translates it into queries on the database using the database metadata, and presents query results in a well-structured and browsable form. Th eysytem maps keywords onto the database schema and uses inter-relationships (i.e., data semantics) among the referred tables to generate meaningful query results. We also describe our prototype for database search, called Mragyati. Th eapproach proposed here is scalable, as it does not build an in-memory graph of the entire database for searching for relationships among the objects selected by the user's query.