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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
9,465 Are Joins over LSM-trees Ready? Take RocksDB as an Example 2025 VLDB 5.2634238e-05
9,491 CEDA: Learned Cardinality Estimation with Domain Adaptation 2023 VLDB 5.2626014e-05
9,512 Poisson Sampling over Acyclic Joins 2026 SIGMOD 5.2571354e-05
9,601 Low Rank Learning for Offline Query Optimization 2025 SIGMOD 5.2487799e-05
9,615 Wii: Dynamic Budget Reallocation In Index Tuning 2024 SIGMOD 5.2436464e-05
9,617 NeuSO: Neural Optimizer for Subgraph Queries 2026 SIGMOD 5.2434488e-05
9,720 Avoiding Materialisation for Guarded Aggregate Queries 2025 VLDB 5.2319816e-05
9,756 Efficient Query Re-optimization with Judicious Subquery Selections 2023 SIGMOD 5.2258278e-05
9,777 PBench: Workload Synthesizer with Real Statistics for Cloud Analytics Benchmarking 2025 VLDB 5.2209769e-05
9,793 Selectivity Estimation for Queries Containing Predicates over Set-Valued Attributes 2023 SIGMOD 5.2193018e-05
9,796 ROME: Robust Query Optimization via Parallel Multi-Plan Execution 2024 SIGMOD 5.21848e-05
9,844 Cardinality Estimation of LIKE Predicate Queries using Deep Learning 2025 SIGMOD 5.2094602e-05
9,867 SPACE: Cardinality Estimation for Path Queries Using Cardinality-Aware Sequence-based Learning 2025 SIGMOD 5.2043672e-05
9,890 Databases in the Era of Memory-Centric Computing 2025 CIDR 5.1997534e-05
9,917 The UDFBench Benchmark for General-purpose UDF Queries 2025 VLDB 5.1955087e-05
9,920 Still Asking: How Good Are Query Optimizers, Really? 2025 VLDB 5.1955087e-05
9,958 A Practical Theory of Generalization in Selectivity Learning 2025 VLDB 5.1879626e-05
9,969 Hybrid Mixed Integer Linear Programming for Large-Scale Join Order Optimisation 2026 VLDB 5.1845938e-05
9,971 Athena: An Effective Learning-based Framework for Query Optimizer Performance Improvement 2025 SIGMOD 5.1845938e-05
9,994 Efficient Algorithms for Cardinality Estimation and Conjunctive Query Evaluation With Simple Degree Constraints 2025 PODS 5.1814573e-05
9,996 Path-centric Cardinality Estimation for Subgraph Matching 2025 VLDB 5.1814573e-05
10,000 Saving Money for Analytical Workloads in the Cloud 2024 VLDB 5.1814573e-05
10,016 Turbo-Charging SPJ Query Plans with Learned Physical Join Operator Selections 2022 VLDB 5.1764556e-05
10,027 Color: A Framework for Applying Graph Coloring to Subgraph Cardinality Estimation 2025 VLDB 5.1745962e-05
10,028 PRICE: A Pretrained Model for Cross-Database Cardinality Estimation 2025 VLDB 5.1745962e-05
10,041 DBMS Fitting: Why should we learn what we already know? 2020 CIDR 5.1709251e-05
10,066 Check Out the Big Brain on BRAD: Simplifying Cloud Data Processing with Learned Automated Data Meshes 2023 VLDB 5.1643809e-05
10,097 SSCard: Substring Cardinality Estimation using Suffix Tree-Guided Learned FM-Index 2026 SIGMOD 5.1502319e-05
10,106 How to Optimize SQL Queries? A Comparison Between Split, Holistic, and Hybrid Approaches 2025 VLDB 5.1435736e-05
10,108 An Elephant Under The Microscope: Analyzing The Interaction Of Optimizer Components In PostgreSQL 2025 SIGMOD 5.1347137e-05
10,135 I Can't Believe It's Not Yannakakis: Pragmatic Bitmap Filters in Microsoft SQL Server 2026 CIDR 5.093636e-05
10,139 Leveraging Query Optimizers to Verify the Soundness of LLM-based Query Rewrites for Real-World Workloads, and More! 2026 CIDR 5.093636e-05
10,148 Size Bound-Adorned Datalog 2026 PODS 5.093636e-05
10,185 A Backend-Agnostic Compiler for Approximate Query Processing with Probabilistic Tensor Algebra 2026 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
10,190 AgenticScholar: Agentic Data Management with Pipeline Orchestration for Scholarly Corpora 2026 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
10,196 Are Learned DBMS Components Robust to Workload Drift?: [Experiments & Analysis] 2026 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
10,218 Detecting Join Bugs in Database Engines via Join Implication Reasoning 2026 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
10,232 EncoderForge: Generating Efficient SQL for Encoders in Machine Learning Inference Pipelines 2026 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
10,237 Factorized and Vectorized Execution: Optimizing Analytical and Semantic Queries over Relations 2026 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
10,243 Finding Missed Optimizations in DBMSs through Unbalanced Short-Circuit Query Construction 2026 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
10,272 NeurBench: A Benchmark Suite for Learned Database Components with Drift Modeling: [Experiments & Analysis] 2026 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
10,301 Towards Selecting Informative Alternative Relational Query Plans for Database Education 2026 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
10,316 GenJoin: Conditional Generative Plan-to-Plan Query Optimizer that Learns from Subplan Hints 2026 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
10,327 Rainbow: Risk-aware Index Benefit Estimation Facing Out Of Distribution Workloads 2026 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
10,329 SieveSketch: A Fine-grained and Adaptive Sketch Framework for Accurate Frequency Estimation 2026 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
10,340 AgentTune: An Agent-Based Large Language Model Framework for Database Knob Tuning 2026 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
10,342 Approximate Query Processing under Updates 2026 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
10,343 APQO: An Adaptive Framework for Parametric Query Optimization 2026 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
10,384 MCTuner: Spatial Decomposition-Enhanced Database Tuning via LLM-Guided Exploration 2026 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
10,394 Query Optimization for Database-Returning Queries 2026 SIGMOD 5.093636e-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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