Business Intelligence (BI) is crucial in modern enterprises and billion-dollar business. Traditionally, technical experts like database administrators would manually prepare BI-models (e.g., in star or snowflake schemas) that join tables in data warehouses, before less-technical business users can run analytics using end-user dashboarding tools. However, the popularity of self-service BI (e.g., Tableau and Power-BI) in recent years creates a strong demand for less technical end-users to build BI-models themselves.<\/p>\n
We develop an Auto-BI system that can accurately predict BI models given a set of input tables, using a principled graph-based optimization problem we propose called \\textit{k-Min-Cost-Arborescence} (k-MCA), which holistically considers both local join prediction and global schema-graph structures, leveraging a graph-theoretical structure called \\textit{arborescence}. While we prove k-MCA is intractable and inapproximate in general, we develop novel algorithms that can solve k-MCA optimally, which is shown to be efficient in practice with sub-second latency and can scale to the largest BI-models we encounter (with close to 100 tables). Auto-BI is rigorously evaluated on a unique dataset with over 100K real BI models we harvested, as well as on 4 popular TPC benchmarks. It is shown to be both efficient and accurate, achieving over 0.9 F1-score on both real and synthetic benchmarks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Business Intelligence (BI) is crucial in modern enterprises and billion-dollar business. Traditionally, technical experts like database administrators would manually prepare BI-models (e.g., in star or snowflake schemas) that join tables in data warehouses, before less-technical business users can run analytics using end-user dashboarding tools. However, the popularity of self-service BI (e.g., Tableau and Power-BI) in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","msr-author-ordering":null,"msr_publishername":"","msr_publisher_other":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_edition":"","msr_editors":"","msr_how_published":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_issue":"","msr_journal":"","msr_number":"","msr_organization":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_page_range_start":"","msr_page_range_end":"","msr_series":"","msr_volume":"","msr_copyright":"","msr_conference_name":"VLDB 2023","msr_doi":"","msr_arxiv_id":"","msr_s2_paper_id":"","msr_mag_id":"","msr_pubmed_id":"","msr_other_authors":"","msr_other_contributors":"","msr_speaker":"","msr_award":"","msr_affiliation":"","msr_institution":"","msr_host":"","msr_version":"","msr_duration":"","msr_original_fields_of_study":"","msr_release_tracker_id":"","msr_s2_match_type":"","msr_citation_count_updated":"","msr_published_date":"2023-8","msr_highlight_text":"","msr_notes":"","msr_longbiography":"","msr_publicationurl":"","msr_external_url":"","msr_secondary_video_url":"","msr_conference_url":"","msr_journal_url":"","msr_s2_pdf_url":"","msr_year":0,"msr_citation_count":0,"msr_influential_citations":0,"msr_reference_count":0,"msr_s2_match_confidence":0,"msr_microsoftintellectualproperty":true,"msr_s2_open_access":false,"msr_s2_author_ids":[],"msr_pub_ids":[],"msr_hide_image_in_river":0,"footnotes":""},"msr-research-highlight":[],"research-area":[13563],"msr-publication-type":[193716],"msr-publisher":[],"msr-focus-area":[],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-post-option":[],"msr-field-of-study":[],"msr-conference":[],"msr-journal":[],"msr-impact-theme":[],"msr-pillar":[],"class_list":["post-950232","msr-research-item","type-msr-research-item","status-publish","hentry","msr-research-area-data-platform-analytics","msr-locale-en_us"],"msr_publishername":"","msr_edition":"","msr_affiliation":"","msr_published_date":"2023-8","msr_host":"","msr_duration":"","msr_version":"","msr_speaker":"","msr_other_contributors":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_journal":"","msr_volume":"","msr_number":"","msr_editors":"","msr_series":"","msr_issue":"","msr_organization":"","msr_how_published":"","msr_notes":"","msr_highlight_text":"","msr_release_tracker_id":"","msr_original_fields_of_study":"","msr_download_urls":"","msr_external_url":"","msr_secondary_video_url":"","msr_longbiography":"","msr_microsoftintellectualproperty":1,"msr_main_download":"","msr_publicationurl":"","msr_doi":"","msr_publication_uploader":[{"type":"file","viewUrl":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/Auto-BI.pdf","id":"950235","title":"auto-bi","label_id":"243109","label":0}],"msr_related_uploader":[{"type":"file","viewUrl":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/Auto-BI.pdf","id":"950235","title":"auto-bi","label_id":"243118","label":0}],"msr_citation_count":0,"msr_citation_count_updated":"","msr_s2_paper_id":"","msr_influential_citations":0,"msr_reference_count":0,"msr_arxiv_id":"","msr_s2_author_ids":[],"msr_s2_open_access":false,"msr_s2_pdf_url":null,"msr_attachments":[{"id":950235,"url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/Auto-BI.pdf"}],"msr-author-ordering":[{"type":"text","value":"Yiming Lin","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Yeye He","user_id":34992,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=Yeye He"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Surajit Chaudhuri","user_id":33764,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=Surajit Chaudhuri"}],"msr_impact_theme":[],"msr_research_lab":[],"msr_event":[],"msr_group":[957177],"msr_project":[967218],"publication":[],"video":[],"msr-tool":[],"msr_publication_type":"inproceedings","related_content":{"projects":[{"ID":967218,"post_title":"Self-service Data Preparation","post_name":"self-service-data-preparation","post_type":"msr-project","post_date":"2023-11-08 14:36:00","post_modified":"2023-11-18 10:15:39","post_status":"publish","permalink":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/project\/self-service-data-preparation\/","post_excerpt":"It is often cited that data scientists spend a significant portion of their time (up to 80%), cleaning and preparing data. 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