Only Aggressive Elephants are Fast Elephants

Summary: HAIL extends HDFS upload to build per-block clustered indexes on every replica, enabling fast selective MapReduce access. Aggressive indexing yields up to 60% faster uploads (default three replicas) and up to 68x faster MapReduce queries, demonstrated across six large clusters. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 10582
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2012
Pagerank: 6.3410921e-05
Overall Rank: 5,156 | 64.63%
DOI: 10.14778/2350229.2350267

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Jens Dittrich (Saarland University)
2. Jorge-Arnulfo Quiané-Ruiz (Saarland University)
3. Stefan Richter (Saarland University)
4. Stefan Schuh (Saarland University)
5. Alekh Jindal (Saarland University)
6. Jörg Schad (Saarland University)

BibTeX Citation

@article{dittrich_vldb12,
        title = {{Only Aggressive Elephants are Fast Elephants}},
        author = {Dittrich, Jens and Quiané-Ruiz, Jorge-Arnulfo and Richter, Stefan and Schuh, Stefan and Jindal, Alekh and Schad, Jörg},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '12},
        volume = {5},
        number = {11},
        pages = {1591--1602},
        doi = {10.14778/2350229.2350267},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/2350229.2350267},
        year = {2012}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 8 of 8 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,903	Instant Loading for Main Memory Databases	2013	VLDB	9.5049156e-05
3,008	Scalable Big Graph Processing in MapReduce	2014	SIGMOD	7.8578871e-05
7,990	ScalaGiST: Scalable Generalized Search Trees for MapReduce Systems [Innovative Systems Paper]	2014	VLDB	5.5107935e-05
8,014	Indexing HDFS Data in PDW: Splitting the data from the index	2014	VLDB	5.5073329e-05
8,276	CARTILAGE: Adding Flexibility to the Hadoop Skeleton	2013	SIGMOD	5.4574671e-05
8,347	WWHow! Freeing Data Storage from Cages	2013	CIDR	5.4472422e-05
9,510	Efficient Big Data Processing in Hadoop MapReduce	2012	VLDB	5.2576928e-05
12,268	Mosquito: Another One Bites the Data Upload STream	2013	VLDB	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 20 of 20 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
44	A Comparison of Approaches to Large-Scale Data Analysis	2009	SIGMOD	0.00046055057
49	Weaving Relations for Cache Performance	2001	VLDB	0.00043781096
67	Making B+-Trees Cache Conscious in Main Memory	2000	SIGMOD	0.00038461275
501	Database Tuning Advisor for Microsoft SQL Server 2005	2004	VLDB	0.0001738508
660	Hadoop++: Making a Yellow Elephant Run Like a Cheetah (Without It Even Noticing)	2010	VLDB	0.00015198804
735	Profiling, What-if Analysis, and Cost-based Optimization of MapReduce Programs	2011	VLDB	0.00014522606
769	A Comparison of Join Algorithms for Log Processing in MapReduce	2010	SIGMOD	0.00014166872
803	MRShare: Sharing Across Multiple Queries in MapReduce	2010	VLDB	0.00013899943
895	Runtime Measurements in the Cloud: Observing, Analyzing, and Reducing Variance	2010	VLDB	0.00013357681
1,257	Automatic Optimization for MapReduce Programs	2011	VLDB	0.000114432
1,436	The Performance of MapReduce: An In-depth Study	2010	VLDB	0.00010797443
1,791	Cheetah: A High Performance, Custom Data Warehouse on Top of MapReduce	2010	VLDB	9.7470504e-05
1,904	CoPhy: A Scalable, Portable, and Interactive Index Advisor for Large Workloads	2011	VLDB	9.5040429e-05
1,927	Here are my Data Files. Here are my Queries. Where are my Results?	2011	CIDR	9.4703074e-05
2,191	Data Warehousing and Analytics Infrastructure at Facebook	2010	SIGMOD	8.9780154e-05
2,642	CoHadoop: Flexible Data Placement and Its Exploitation in Hadoop	2011	VLDB	8.3059948e-05
2,811	Constrained Physical Design Tuning	2008	VLDB	8.0982817e-05
2,849	Column-Oriented Storage Techniques for MapReduce	2011	VLDB	8.053191e-05
3,104	Energy Management for MapReduce Clusters	2010	VLDB	7.7552953e-05
9,589	A Framework for Supporting DBMS-like Indexes in the Cloud	2011	VLDB	5.2521633e-05

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#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	1,889	SQL-on-Hadoop: Full Circle Back to Shared-Nothing Database Architectures	2014	VLDB
2	2,265	A Platform for Scalable One-Pass Analytics using MapReduce	2011	SIGMOD
3	2,159	Efficient Processing of Data Warehousing Queries in a Split Execution Environment	2011	SIGMOD
4	2,849	Column-Oriented Storage Techniques for MapReduce	2011	VLDB
5	3,096	Early Accurate Results for Advanced Analytics on MapReduce	2012	VLDB
6	12,156	Shared Execution of Recurring Workloads in MapReduce	2015	VLDB
7	12,298	Optimization Strategies for A/B Testing on HADOOP	2013	VLDB
8	372	HaLoop: Efficient Iterative Data Processing on Large Clusters	2010	VLDB
9	1,436	The Performance of MapReduce: An In-depth Study	2010	VLDB
10	660	Hadoop++: Making a Yellow Elephant Run Like a Cheetah (Without It Even Noticing)	2010	VLDB