Understanding the compromise between skyline and ranking queries

Abstract: Skyline and Ranking queries have gained great popularity in the recent years. These two techniques are crucial for multi-criteria decision support applications, which are now more popular than ever before. Skyline and Ranking queries are, however, affected by well-known limitations. In the past recent years, the database community provided numerous studies in this field with the aim to overcome the weaknesses of these two approaches. This survey introduces the reader to Skyline and Ranking queries, explaining the concepts on which they are based, with the intent to present the compromise between the two techniques: flexible skylines.