Provenance in databases: Why, how, and where

Different notions of provenance for database queries have been proposed and studied in the past few years. In this article, we detail three main notions of database provenance, some of their applications, and compare and contrast amongst them. Specifically, we review why, how, and where provenance, describe the relationships among these notions of provenance, and describe some of their applications in confidence computation, view maintenance and update, debugging, and annotation propagation. © 2009 J. Cheney, L. Chiticariu and W.-C. Tan.