Auto-Join: Joining Tables by Leveraging Transformations

Summary: Auto-Join automatically synthesizes transformation programs that reconcile heterogeneous textual representations before equi-joining tables. Its optimal sampling strategy enables scalable operator-space search with high-probability success, validated on web and enterprise data. (summarized by gpt-5.6-luna on Jul 24 2026)

Paper ID: 11578
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2017
Pagerank: 7.8975073e-05
Overall Rank: 2,980 | 79.56%
DOI: 10.14778/3115404.3115414

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Erkang Zhu (University of Toronto)
2. Yeye He (Microsoft)
3. Surajit Chaudhuri (Microsoft)

BibTeX Citation

@article{zhu_vldb17,
        title = {{Auto-Join: Joining Tables by Leveraging Transformations}},
        author = {Zhu, Erkang and He, Yeye and Chaudhuri, Surajit},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '17},
        volume = {10},
        number = {10},
        pages = {1034--1047},
        doi = {10.14778/3115404.3115414},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/3115404.3115414},
        year = {2017}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 26 of 26 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,402	Creating Embeddings of Heterogeneous Relational Datasets for Data Integration Tasks	2020	SIGMOD	0.00010888094
2,099	Table-GPT: Table Fine-tuned GPT for Diverse Table Tasks	2024	SIGMOD	9.1682353e-05
2,216	Open Data Integration	2018	VLDB	8.9374127e-05
2,728	Uni-Detect: A Unified Approach to Automated Error Detection in Tables	2019	SIGMOD	8.1995954e-05
2,744	Auto-Suggest: Learning-to-Recommend Data Preparation Steps Using Data Science Notebooks	2020	SIGMOD	8.1781662e-05
2,978	Transform-Data-by-Example (TDE): An Extensible Search Engine for Data Transformations	2018	VLDB	7.9030989e-05
3,073	DeepJoin: Joinable Table Discovery with Pre-trained Language Models	2023	VLDB	7.785842e-05
4,123	Integrating Data Lake Tables	2023	VLDB	6.8878137e-05
4,412	Auto-Transform: Learning-to-Transform by Patterns	2020	VLDB	6.7168614e-05
4,875	Auto-Pipeline: Synthesizing Complex Data Pipelines By-Target Using Reinforcement Learning and Search	2021	VLDB	6.4689177e-05
4,990	Explaining Dataset Changes for Semantic Data Versioning with Explain-Da-V	2023	VLDB	6.4105738e-05
5,134	Auto-FuzzyJoin: Auto-Program Fuzzy Similarity Joins Without Labeled Examples	2021	SIGMOD	6.3532024e-05
5,396	Putting Things into Context: Rich Explanations for Query Answers using Join Graphs	2021	SIGMOD	6.2329373e-05
5,403	Auto-Tables: Synthesizing Multi-Step Transformations to Relationalize Tables without Using Examples	2023	VLDB	6.2306083e-05
5,479	MATE: Multi-Attribute Table Extraction	2022	VLDB	6.204351e-05
6,545	DTT: An Example-Driven Tabular Transformer for Joinability by Leveraging Large Language Models	2024	SIGMOD	5.8454882e-05
6,957	Design and Analysis of a Processing-in-DIMM Join Algorithm: A Case Study with UPMEM DIMMs	2023	SIGMOD	5.7303405e-05
7,572	Cross Modal Data Discovery over Structured and Unstructured Data Lakes	2023	VLDB	5.5938952e-05
8,180	ConnectionLens: Finding Connections Across Heterogeneous Data Sources	2018	VLDB	5.4724852e-05
8,797	Auto-Formula: Recommend Formulas in Spreadsheets using Contrastive Learning for Table Representations	2024	SIGMOD	5.3702298e-05
9,380	Auto-Prep: Holistic Prediction of Data Preparation Steps for Self-Service Business Intelligence	2025	VLDB	5.2755515e-05
9,505	TabulaX: Leveraging Large Language Models for Multi-Class Table Transformations	2025	VLDB	5.258497e-05
9,629	Auto-BI: Automatically Build BI-Models Leveraging Local Join Prediction and Global Schema Graph	2023	VLDB	5.2434488e-05
10,202	BAT: Target-Instance-Free Data Preparation Synthesis via LLM-Driven Tree Search	2026	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
10,856	Optimized Batch Prompting for Cost-effective LLMs	2025	VLDB	5.093636e-05
11,541	SPINE: Scaling up Programming-by-Negative-Example for String Filtering and Transformation	2022	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 7 of 7 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
432	Mining Database Structure; Or, How to Build a Data Quality Browser	2002	SIGMOD	0.00018572055
1,160	BlinkFill: Semi-supervised Programming By Example for Syntactic String Transformations	2016	VLDB	0.00011883163
1,165	Foofah: Transforming Data By Example	2017	SIGMOD	0.00011860616
1,939	iMAP: Discovering Complex Semantic Matches between Database Schemas	2004	SIGMOD	9.4490491e-05
3,294	Multi-column Substring Matching for Database Schema Translation	2006	VLDB	7.5491351e-05
3,746	Discovering Linkage Points over Web Data	2013	VLDB	7.1561558e-05
4,525	SEMA-JOIN: Joining Semantically-Related Tables Using Big Table Corpora	2015	VLDB	6.6456999e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	2,186	String Similarity Joins: An Experimental Evaluation	2014	VLDB
2	1,313	Reverse Engineering Complex Join Queries	2013	SIGMOD
3	9,629	Auto-BI: Automatically Build BI-Models Leveraging Local Join Prediction and Global Schema Graph	2023	VLDB
4	4,412	Auto-Transform: Learning-to-Transform by Patterns	2020	VLDB
5	3,073	DeepJoin: Joinable Table Discovery with Pre-trained Language Models	2023	VLDB
6	9,380	Auto-Prep: Holistic Prediction of Data Preparation Steps for Self-Service Business Intelligence	2025	VLDB
7	6,545	DTT: An Example-Driven Tabular Transformer for Joinability by Leveraging Large Language Models	2024	SIGMOD
8	5,134	Auto-FuzzyJoin: Auto-Program Fuzzy Similarity Joins Without Labeled Examples	2021	SIGMOD
9	4,525	SEMA-JOIN: Joining Semantically-Related Tables Using Big Table Corpora	2015	VLDB
10	5,403	Auto-Tables: Synthesizing Multi-Step Transformations to Relationalize Tables without Using Examples	2023	VLDB