When a data analyst runs some query to analyze her data, she often wants to ask some follow-up questions, about the result of the query. Why-questions take many shapes, and occur in many scenarios. Why is a particular tuple in the answer? Why is it not in the answer? Why is this graph decreasing? Why did we observe a sudden burst of error messages in online monitoring? Database researchers have noted the need for why-questions, and the literature contains several approaches, mostly tailored to specific applications. Despite the interest and the work in this area, there is currently no consensus of what an explanation to a query answer should be, and how one should compute it.

中文翻译：

---

技术视角

当数据分析师运行一些查询来分析她的数据时，她经常想问一些关于查询结果的后续问题。为什么问题有多种形式，并且出现在许多场景中。为什么答案中有一个特定的元组？为什么不在答案中？为什么这个图表在减少？为什么我们在在线监控中观察到突然爆发的错误消息？数据库研究人员已经注意到为什么问题的必要性，并且文献包含几种方法，主要针对特定​​应用程序量身定制。尽管在这方面有兴趣和工作，但目前对于查询答案的解释应该是什么以及应该如何计算它还没有达成共识。