Skimmer: rapid scrolling of relational query results

A relational database often yields a large set of tuples as the result of a query. Users browse this result set to find the information they require. If the result set is large, there may be many pages of data to browse. Since results comprise tuples of alphanumeric values that have few visual markers, it is hard to browse the data quickly, even if it is sorted. In this paper, we describe the design of a system for browsing relational data by scrolling through it at a high speed. Rather than showing the user a fast changing blur, the system presents the user with a small number of representative tuples. Representative tuples are selected to provide a "good impression" of the query result. We show that the information loss to the user is limited, even at high scrolling speeds, and that our algorithms can pick good representatives fast enough to provide for real-time, high-speed scrolling over large datasets.