  The web, through many search engine sites, has popularized the keyword-based
search paradigm, where a user can specify a string of keywords and expect to
retrieve relevant documents, possibly ranked by their relevance to the query.
Since a lot of information is stored in databases (and not as HTML documents),
it is important to provide a similar search paradigm for databases, where users
can query a database without knowing the database schema and database query
languages such as SQL. In this paper, we propose such a database search system,
which accepts a free-form query as a collection of keywords, translates it into
queries on the database using the database metadata, and presents query results
in a well-structured and browsable form. Th eysytem maps keywords onto the
database schema and uses inter-relationships (i.e., data semantics) among the
referred tables to generate meaningful query results. We also describe our
prototype for database search, called Mragyati. Th eapproach proposed here is
scalable, as it does not build an in-memory graph of the entire database for
searching for relationships among the objects selected by the user's query.
