On the Complexity of the View-Selection Problem

Summary: Shows greedy can be Ω(n) (≥n/12) suboptimal, and unless P=NP any poly-time algorithm is n^{1−ε}-inapproximable for infinitely many n, even for bounded-degree/depth posets. Bicriteria (αk) algorithms also fail; view-selection essentially inapproximable, so focus on restricted practical cases and empirical heuristics. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 1170
Venue: PODS
Year: 1999
Pagerank: 7.6547735e-05
Overall Rank: 3,188 | 78.13%
DOI: 10.1145/303976.303993

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Howard Karloff (Georgia Institute of Technology)
2. Milena Mihail (Bell Communications Research; Georgia Institute of Technology)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{karloff_pods99,
        address = {New York, NY, USA},
        series = {{PODS} '99},
        title = {{On the Complexity of the View-Selection Problem}},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/303976.303993},
        doi = {10.1145/303976.303993},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} Symposium on {Principles} of {Database} {Systems}},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        author = {Karloff, Howard and Mihail, Milena},
        year = {1999}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 7 of 7 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
3,160	Graph Cube: On Warehousing and OLAP Multidimensional Networks	2011	SIGMOD	7.6823631e-05
6,753	Optimal Indexing Using Near-Minimal Space [Extended Abstract]	2003	PODS	5.7836523e-05
6,902	The Polynomial Complexity of Fully Materialized Coalesced Cubes	2004	VLDB	5.7426524e-05
7,896	Optimizing Index for Taxonomy Keyword Search	2012	SIGMOD	5.5201308e-05
10,112	Classifier Construction Under Budget Constraints	2022	SIGMOD	5.1319012e-05
10,404	Stochastic Submodular Data Forgetting	2026	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
11,790	Minimization of Classifier Construction Cost for Search Queries	2020	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 1 of 1 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
11	Implementing Data Cubes Efficiently	1996	SIGMOD	0.00071822821

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	2,525	Answering Top-k Queries Using Views	2006	VLDB
2	929	Materialized View Selection and Maintenance Using Multi-Query Optimization	2001	SIGMOD
3	554	Answering Queries with Aggregation Using Views	1996	VLDB
4	8,527	View Selection over Knowledge Graphs in Triple Stores	2021	VLDB
5	6,090	Scalable Query Rewriting: A Graph-Based Approach	2011	SIGMOD
6	9,403	Materializing Views with Minimal Size To Answer Queries	2003	PODS
7	69	Answering Queries Using Views (Extended Abstract)	1995	PODS
8	13,955	The View-Selection Problem Has an Exponential-Time Lower Bound for Conjunctive Queries and Views	2002	PODS
9	3,553	On the Complexity of Approximate Query Optimization	2002	PODS
10	3,330	A Formal Perspective on the View Selection Problem	2001	VLDB