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How Good Are Query Optimizers, Really?

Summary: Introduces the Join Order Benchmark (JOB) to test optimizer components on real-world, multi-join workloads. Cardinality estimators are error-prone; cost models matter less than estimates; exhaustive dynamic programming improves plan quality over heuristics under poor cardinality. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID
11501
Venue
VLDB
Year
2016
Pagerank
0.00059284255
Overall Rank
18 | 99.88%
DOI
10.14778/2850583.2850594

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

BibTeX Citation

@article{leis_vldb16,
        title = {{How Good Are Query Optimizers, Really?}},
        author = {Leis, Viktor and Gubichev, Andrey and Mirchev, Atanas and Boncz, Peter and Kemper, Alfons and Neumann, Thomas},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '16},
        volume = {9},
        number = {3},
        pages = {204--215},
        doi = {10.14778/2850583.2850594},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/2850583.2850594},
        year = {2016}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 50 of 313 citing papers.

Rank Citing Paper Year Venue Pagerank
7,386 Instance-Optimal Acyclic Join Processing Without Regret: Engineering the Yannakakis Algorithm in Column Stores 2025 VLDB 5.6273882e-05
7,396 Fast Detection of Denial Constraint Violations 2022 VLDB 5.6257228e-05
7,495 On the Calculation of Optimality Ranges for Relational Query Execution Plans 2018 SIGMOD 5.6041473e-05
7,655 Plan Stitch: Harnessing the Best of Many Plans 2018 VLDB 5.5741093e-05
7,747 Convolution and Cross-Correlation of Count Sketches Enables Fast Cardinality Estimation of Multi-Join Queries 2024 SIGMOD 5.5529458e-05
7,755 Blueprinting the Cloud: Unifying and Automatically Optimizing Cloud Data Infrastructures with BRAD 2024 VLDB 5.5519655e-05
7,760 NOCAP: Near-Optimal Correlation-Aware Partitioning Joins 2023 SIGMOD 5.5505651e-05
7,774 Building Advanced SQL Analytics From Low-Level Plan Operators 2021 SIGMOD 5.5468469e-05
7,787 A Practical Approach to Groupjoin and Nested Aggregates 2021 VLDB 5.5449593e-05
7,809 Can Large Language Models Be Query Optimizer for Relational Databases? 2026 SIGMOD 5.5399022e-05
7,825 RCRank: Multimodal Ranking of Root Causes of Slow Queries in Cloud Database Systems 2025 VLDB 5.5367884e-05
7,846 The Holon Approach for Simultaneously Tuning Multiple Components in a Self-Driving Database Management System with Machine Learning via Synthesized Proto-Actions 2024 VLDB 5.5331459e-05
7,882 Efficiently Computing Join Orders with Heuristic Search 2023 SIGMOD 5.5237338e-05
7,967 Thrifty Query Execution via Incrementability 2020 SIGMOD 5.5169373e-05
7,978 ADOPT: Adaptively Optimizing Attribute Orders for Worst-Case Optimal Join Algorithms via Reinforcement Learning 2023 VLDB 5.514996e-05
8,004 A Concave Path to Low-overhead Robust Query Processing 2018 VLDB 5.5082745e-05
8,042 Grep: A Graph Learning Based Database Partitioning System 2023 SIGMOD 5.5015896e-05
8,074 Parachute: Single-Pass Bi-Directional Information Passing 2025 VLDB 5.4929961e-05
8,076 Leveraging Dynamic and Heterogeneous Workload Knowledge to Boost the Performance of Index Advisors 2024 VLDB 5.4927414e-05
8,127 The Case for NLP-Enhanced Database Tuning: Towards Tuning Tools that “Read the Manual” 2021 VLDB 5.4826853e-05
8,163 Learned Offline Query Planning via Bayesian Optimization 2025 SIGMOD 5.4751517e-05
8,183 alpha to omega: The Greek Alphabet of Sampling 2020 CIDR 5.4714466e-05
8,211 MONSOON: Multi-Step Optimization and Execution of Queries with Partially Obscured Predicates 2020 SIGMOD 5.4658735e-05
8,234 The Case for Learned In-Memory Joins 2023 VLDB 5.460955e-05
8,305 PARQO: Penalty-Aware Robust Plan Selection in Query Optimization 2024 VLDB 5.4568571e-05
8,310 TreeSensing: Linearly Compressing Sketches with Flexibility 2023 SIGMOD 5.4556836e-05
8,368 Excalibur: A Virtual Machine for Adaptive Fine-grained JIT-Compiled Query Execution based on VOILA 2023 VLDB 5.4419148e-05
8,413 Conditional Cuckoo Filters 2021 SIGMOD 5.4306049e-05
8,468 Making RDBMSs Efficient on Graph Workloads Through Predefined Joins 2022 VLDB 5.418656e-05
8,494 POLAR: Adaptive and Non-invasive Join Order Selection via Plans of Least Resistance 2024 VLDB 5.4142129e-05
8,581 PostCENN: PostgreSQL with Machine Learning Models for Cardinality Estimation 2021 VLDB 5.4082749e-05
8,643 PACE: Poisoning Attacks on Learned Cardinality Estimation 2024 SIGMOD 5.3940849e-05
8,684 Workload-driven, Lazy Discovery of Data Dependencies for Query Optimization 2022 CIDR 5.3849937e-05
8,698 SkinnerMT: Parallelizing for Efficiency and Robustness in Adaptive Query Processing on Multicore Platforms 2023 VLDB 5.3830073e-05
8,782 Filtered Vector Search: State-of-the-art and Research Opportunities 2025 VLDB 5.374155e-05
8,818 Resource-Adaptive Query Execution with Paged Memory Management 2025 CIDR 5.3637177e-05
8,849 ByteCard: Enhancing ByteDance’s Data Warehouse with Learned Cardinality Estimation 2024 SIGMOD 5.3577504e-05
8,868 SemBench: A Benchmark for Semantic Query Processing Engines 2026 VLDB 5.3546848e-05
8,893 Optimizing Disjunctive Queries with Tagged Execution 2024 SIGMOD 5.3504579e-05
8,986 One Seed, Two Birds: A Unified Learned Structure for Exact and Approximate Counting 2024 SIGMOD 5.3387783e-05
9,027 JoinSketch: A Sketch Algorithm for Accurate and Unbiased Inner-Product Estimation 2023 SIGMOD 5.3293224e-05
9,042 DPconv: Super-Polynomially Faster Join Ordering 2024 SIGMOD 5.3256042e-05
9,123 BASE: Bridging the Gap between Cost and Latency for Query Optimization 2023 VLDB 5.3193264e-05
9,183 Extending SQL to Return a Subdatabase 2025 SIGMOD 5.3058708e-05
9,192 Efficient and Effective Cardinality Estimation for Skyline Family 2023 SIGMOD 5.3058708e-05
9,351 DBG-PT: A Large Language Model Assisted Query Performance Regression Debugger 2024 VLDB 5.2839552e-05
9,428 LIMAO: A Framework for Lifelong Modular Learned Query Optimization 2025 VLDB 5.2709145e-05
9,433 FEBench: A Benchmark for Real-Time Relational Data Feature Extraction 2023 VLDB 5.2696166e-05
9,441 Db2une: Tuning Under Pressure via Deep Learning 2024 VLDB 5.2678428e-05
9,455 Small Selectivities Matter: Lifting the Burden of Empty Samples 2021 SIGMOD 5.2653318e-05
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Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 23 of 23 cited papers.

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

Rank Cited Paper Year Venue Pagerank
1 Access Path Selection in a Relational Database Management System 1979 SIGMOD 0.0024089429
89 On the Propagation of Errors in the Size of Join Results 1991 SIGMOD 0.00035031529
100 LEO - DB2's LEarning Optimizer 2001 VLDB 0.00034385207
101 Selectivity Estimation Without the Attribute Value Independence Assumption 1997 VLDB 0.00034376651
159 CORDS: Automatic Discovery of Correlations and Soft Functional Dependencies 2004 SIGMOD 0.00028129426
257 The History of Histograms (abridged) 2003 VLDB 0.00023154793
388 Preventing Bad Plans by Bounding the Impact of Cardinality Estimation Errors 2009 VLDB 0.00019410042
396 R* Optimizer Validation and Performance Evaluation for Local Queries 1986 SIGMOD 0.00019287574
566 Towards a Robust Query Optimizer: A Principled and Practical Approach 2005 SIGMOD 0.00016436005
1,013 Dynamic Programming Strikes Back 2008 SIGMOD 0.00012652549
1,071 Lightweight Graphical Models for Selectivity Estimation Without Independence Assumptions 2011 VLDB 0.00012322342
1,604 The Picasso Database Query Optimizer Visualizer 2010 VLDB 0.00010230973
1,893 CS2: A New Database Synopsis for Query Estimation 2013 SIGMOD 9.5269935e-05
1,936 Consistently Estimating the Selectivity of Conjuncts of Predicates 2005 VLDB 9.4557372e-05
1,987 Plan Bouquets: Query Processing without Selectivity Estimation 2014 SIGMOD 9.3517129e-05
2,250 Cache-Efficient Aggregation: Hashing Is Sorting 2015 SIGMOD 8.8694486e-05
2,275 Counter Strike: Generic Top-Down Join Enumeration for Hypergraphs 2013 VLDB 8.8196821e-05
2,664 Adaptive and Big Data Scale Parallel Execution in Oracle 2013 VLDB 8.2816537e-05
2,944 Query Optimizers: Time to Rethink the Contract? 2009 SIGMOD 7.9335187e-05
3,426 Exact Cardinality Query Optimization for Optimizer Testing 2009 VLDB 7.4218997e-05
3,813 Query Simplification: Graceful Degradation for Join-Order Optimization 2009 SIGMOD 7.1051056e-05
4,091 Of Snowstorms and Bushy Trees 2014 VLDB 6.9090244e-05
6,688 ROX: Run-time Optimization of XQueries 2009 SIGMOD 5.8015211e-05
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