What is Query by Example?
Query By Example brings supervised machine learning into the realm of SQL in order to provide intuitive, qualitative queries. Within your query, you list a few examples which are LIKE the kind of rows you’re looking for, and a few more which are NOT LIKE the kind of rows you’re looking for, and using a fast, flexible machine learning algorithm, the database will automatically find rows which are similar to what you’re interested in. At the moment, QBE only works on real-valued data, i.e., integers and floats. Future releases will address text data and perhaps even binary data, but for the moment, this is a limitation of the system. (Don’t worry. There’s a lot of real-valued data out there.
Query by example (QBE) is a query language for relational databases similar to Structured Query Language (SQL). The “by example” portion of this data gathering language allows the person or application looking to retrieve data from the relational database to complete the information that they know about the data they are looking for. The Query by example method might include a form that the user would complete to generate a SQL query that the database understands. Suppose for example that there existed a database full of employees in an organization and this information was made available to the employees in case they needed to communicate with other employees. The database storing the information understands commands like select fname from employees where lname = ‘smith’, however many people do not understand this type of syntax. Query by example can help with this. The following statement: select fname, lname, extension from employees where lname =’smith’ tells the database to look t
