Robustness Metrics for Relational Query Execution Plans

Summary: Introduces three metrics to quantify relational plan robustness under cardinality-estimation errors. A cost–robustness-aware optimizer improves plan selection over conventional optimization, achieving up to 3.49× speedups on real and synthetic workloads. (summarized by gpt-5.6-luna on Jul 24 2026)

Paper ID: 11813
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2018
Pagerank: 6.0060149e-05
Overall Rank: 6,019 | 58.71%
DOI: 10.14778/3236187.3236191

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Florian Wolf (SAP; Technical University of Ilmenau)
2. Michael Brendle (SAP; University of Konstanz)
3. Norman May (SAP)
4. Paul R. Willems (SAP)
5. Kai-Uwe Sattler (Technical University of Ilmenau)
6. Michael Grossniklaus (University of Konstanz)

BibTeX Citation

@article{wolf_vldb18,
        title = {{Robustness Metrics for Relational Query Execution Plans}},
        author = {Wolf, Florian and Brendle, Michael and May, Norman and Willems, Paul R. and Sattler, Kai-Uwe and Grossniklaus, Michael},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '18},
        volume = {11},
        number = {11},
        pages = {1360--1372},
        doi = {10.14778/3236187.3236191},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/3236187.3236191},
        year = {2018}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 10 of 10 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
5,059	Steering Query Optimizers: A Practical Take on Big Data Workloads	2021	SIGMOD	6.3807509e-05
5,529	Debunking the Myth of Join Ordering: Toward Robust SQL Analytics	2025	SIGMOD	6.18591e-05
7,829	Robust Query Processing: Mission Possible	2020	VLDB	5.5360082e-05
8,305	PARQO: Penalty-Aware Robust Plan Selection in Query Optimization	2024	VLDB	5.4568571e-05
9,612	Memory Efficient Scheduling of Query Pipeline Execution	2022	CIDR	5.2449175e-05
9,756	Efficient Query Re-optimization with Judicious Subquery Selections	2023	SIGMOD	5.2258278e-05
10,151	Coresets for Robust Query Optimization	2026	PODS	5.093636e-05
10,881	Robust Plan Evaluation based on Approximate Probabilistic Machine Learning	2025	VLDB	5.093636e-05
10,986	PAR2QO: Parametric Penalty-Aware Robust Query Optimization	2025	VLDB	5.093636e-05
11,160	Sub-optimal Join Order Identification with L1-error	2024	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 13 of 13 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
18	How Good Are Query Optimizers, Really?	2016	VLDB	0.00059284255
89	On the Propagation of Errors in the Size of Join Results	1991	SIGMOD	0.00035031529
288	Towards Estimation Error Guarantees for Distinct Values	2000	PODS	0.00022296371
388	Preventing Bad Plans by Bounding the Impact of Cardinality Estimation Errors	2009	VLDB	0.00019410042
566	Towards a Robust Query Optimizer: A Principled and Practical Approach	2005	SIGMOD	0.00016436005
829	Proactive Re-Optimization	2005	SIGMOD	0.00013769838
1,321	Parametric Query Optimization for Linear and Piecewise Linear Cost Functions	2002	VLDB	0.00011162369
1,987	Plan Bouquets: Query Processing without Selectivity Estimation	2014	SIGMOD	9.3517129e-05
3,506	Identifying Robust Plans through Plan Diagram Reduction	2008	VLDB	7.3581509e-05
5,898	On the Stability of Plan Costs and the Costs of Plan Stability	2010	VLDB	6.0471908e-05
6,164	On the Complexity of Generating Optimal Plans with Cross Products (extended abstract)	1997	PODS	5.9532278e-05
7,495	On the Calculation of Optimality Ranges for Relational Query Execution Plans	2018	SIGMOD	5.6041473e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	1,122	Cardinality Estimation in DBMS: A Comprehensive Benchmark Evaluation	2022	VLDB
2	492	Robust Query Processing through Progressive Optimization	2004	SIGMOD
3	9,796	ROME: Robust Query Optimization via Parallel Multi-Plan Execution	2024	SIGMOD
4	3,506	Identifying Robust Plans through Plan Diagram Reduction	2008	VLDB
5	682	Robust Estimation of Resource Consumption for SQL Queries using Statistical Techniques	2012	VLDB
6	7,495	On the Calculation of Optimality Ranges for Relational Query Execution Plans	2018	SIGMOD
7	10,881	Robust Plan Evaluation based on Approximate Probabilistic Machine Learning	2025	VLDB
8	12,486	Visualizing the robustness of query execution	2009	CIDR
9	10,151	Coresets for Robust Query Optimization	2026	PODS
10	566	Towards a Robust Query Optimizer: A Principled and Practical Approach	2005	SIGMOD