Knowledge Management Group

I am a PhD student at the Department of Computer Science. I received my Bachelor and Master degrees in Electronic Engineering and Information Technology Management in Iran. Previously, I worked in the National Iranian Oil Company for more than four years as a data analyst.

I have sound interests on semantics in databases. I have worked on discovery and visualization of keys and constraints in databases which help database design team and ensure them about a higher degree of data quality.

I am currently working on the Discovery, Enforcement and Visualization of Partial Referential Integrity in SQL Databases as my PhD research. There are important benefits to enforcing integrity in a database: better data quality, increased consistency, lower overall maintenance costs, and a better ability to form decisions. One of the most popular classes of integrity constraints are so-called foreign keys. Intuitively speaking, these constraints enforce that tuples in one table uniquely identify tuples in some other table. For example, each id on a payroll identifies a unique member of staff. The industry standard SQL for defining and manipulating data proposes three different semantics of foreign keys in the presence of partial data. Two of these semantics neglect partial tuples, while the third semantics - partial referential integrity - also checks referential integrity for partial tuples. Surprisingly, partial referential integrity does not enjoy any built-in support in any commercial or open-source database management systems. For my PhD, I investigate three different lines of research: the enforcement and validation of partial referential integrity constraints in SQL databases, their discovery from an arbitrarily given SQL database, and their concise visualization in form of a semantically informative SQL database. My research aims to close a long-standing gap between the industry standard for data management and its implementations. It will do so by developing techniques and tools that lift partial referential integrity to a first- class citizen of database management systems.

Sebastian Link and Mozhgan Memari , (2013). Static Analysis of Partial Referential Integrity for Better Quality SQL Data, The nineteenth Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS), Chicago, USA, August 15-17.

Sebastian Link and Mozhgan Memari , (2013). Letting keys and functional dependencies out of the bag, The ninth Asia-Pacific Conference on Conceptual Modelling (APCCM ), Adelaide, Australia, January 29 - February 1.

Van Bao Tran Le, Sebastian Link and Mozhgan Memari, (2012). Schema- and data-driven SQL key discovery, Journal of Computing Science and Engineering, Volume 6(3), pages 193-206, 2012

Van Bao Tran Le, Sebastian Link and Mozhgan Memari, (2012). Discovery of keys from SQL tables, Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications - DASFAA 2012, Busan, Korea, Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 7238, pages 48-62.