| # Positioning of SREB — corrected |
|
|
| This note exists because our first formulation was **wrong** and was caught during |
| literature review on 2026-10-19. It is kept in the repository so the mistake is not |
| repeated and so reviewers can see the reasoning. |
|
|
| ## What we claimed first (wrong) |
|
|
| > "SREB is the first dataset of executable evidence for SQL rewrites." |
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|
| That is false. Two predecessors exist: |
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|
| | Work | What it already does | |
| |---|---| |
| | **SQL-RewriteBench** (arXiv 2607.09251, 2026) | 180 instances, correctness-gated, full-denominator evaluation, a database and result evidence per instance | |
| | **provensql** (Zenodo 10.5281/zenodo.21854387, preprint 08.2026) | for a DIFFERENT verdict returns a **concrete executable counterexample database instance** as a replayable witness; 213 annotated rewrites, 511 mutations | |
|
|
| So "executable counterexample" is **not** our novelty. Writing it as ours would be |
| dishonest and a reviewer would find these two papers in minutes. |
|
|
| ## What we can honestly claim |
|
|
| > To our knowledge, SREB is the first public dataset that links **model-proposed** |
| > rewrites to the **state violating the schema constraints** and to the **differing rows**, |
| > at the level of individual model samples rather than method scores. |
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|
| The distinction is narrow but real: |
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| - SQL-RewriteBench **scores methods** on instances; it is an evaluation harness. |
| - provensql is a **verdict tool** for individual rewrites: it answers "correct or |
| different" and can produce a witness for that one rewrite. |
| - SREB records **what a model proposed across a corpus**, keeps the raw candidate, the |
| refuting state profile and the witness together, and separates refutation rate from |
| rewrite propensity. |
|
|
| ## What that means for the paper |
|
|
| 1. The claim in `PAPER-OUTLINE.md` §"claim in one sentence" must be replaced. |
| 2. Related Work must cite both predecessors explicitly, not hide them. |
| 3. The contribution should shift from "we have evidence" to **"we can say how adequate the |
| evidence is"** — i.e. whether a finite bank of states catches the semantic errors that |
| actually occur, and which state profiles are responsible for catching them. |
|
|
| ## The open question this exposes |
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|
| If counterexample evidence is not new, the defensible contribution is **adequacy**: |
| given a bank of allowed states, what fraction of wrong rewrites does it refute? That is a |
| mutation-adequacy question for SQL queries, and it is the direction the paper should take |
| instead of claiming priority on "evidence". |
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|
