Towards Practical Differential Privacy for SQL Queries

Summary: Introduces elastic sensitivity, an upper bound on local sensitivity for general equijoins, enabling DP for practical SQL workloads. FLEX integrates this technique with existing databases, supporting real-world queries with just 0.03% overhead. (summarized by gpt-5.6-luna on Jul 24 2026)

Paper ID: 11950
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2018
Pagerank: 0.00022445849
Overall Rank: 281 | 98.08%
DOI: 10.1145/3177732.3177733

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Noah Johnson (University of California Berkeley)
2. Joseph P. Near (University of California Berkeley)
3. Dawn Song (University of California Berkeley)

BibTeX Citation

@article{johnson_vldb18,
        title = {{Towards Practical Differential Privacy for SQL Queries}},
        author = {Johnson, Noah and Near, Joseph P. and Song, Dawn},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '18},
        volume = {11},
        number = {5},
        pages = {526--539},
        doi = {10.1145/3177732.3177733},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3177732.3177733},
        year = {2018}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 11 of 61 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
10,775	PrivPetal: Relational Data Synthesis via Permutation Relations	2025	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
10,786	Computing Inconsistency Measures Under Differential Privacy	2025	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
11,203	Personalized Truncation for Personalized Privacy	2024	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
11,259	HRNet: Differentially Private Hierarchical and Multi-Resolution Network for Human Mobility Data Synthesization	2024	VLDB	5.093636e-05
11,280	Confidence Intervals for Private Query Processing	2024	VLDB	5.093636e-05
11,318	DOP-SQL: A General-purpose, High-utility, and Extensible Private SQL System	2024	VLDB	5.093636e-05
11,369	Universal Private Estimators	2023	PODS	5.093636e-05
11,580	MIDE: Accuracy Aware Minimally Invasive Data Exploration For Decision Support	2022	VLDB	5.093636e-05
11,682	Practical Security and Privacy for Database Systems	2021	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
11,712	ATLANTIC: Making Database Differentially Private and Faster with Accuracy Guarantee	2021	VLDB	5.093636e-05
11,725	Catch a Blowfish Alive: A Demonstration of Policy-Aware Differential Privacy for Interactive Data Exploration	2021	VLDB	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 10 of 10 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
62	Privacy Integrated Queries: An Extensible Platform for Privacy-Preserving Data Analysis	2009	SIGMOD	0.00038970535
596	Private Analysis of Graph Structure	2011	VLDB	0.00015926024
611	Optimizing Linear Counting Queries Under Differential Privacy	2010	PODS	0.00015747402
775	Differentially Private Data Cubes: Optimizing Noise Sources and Consistency	2011	SIGMOD	0.00014110531
836	Recursive Mechanism: Towards Node Differential Privacy and Unrestricted Joins	2013	SIGMOD	0.00013715654
1,220	Calibrating Data to Sensitivity in Private Data Analysis: A Platform for Differentially-Private Analysis of Weighted Datasets	2014	VLDB	0.00011619529
1,230	No Free Lunch in Data Privacy	2011	SIGMOD	0.00011572271
1,906	GUPT: Privacy Preserving Data Analysis Made Easy	2012	SIGMOD	9.5020196e-05
2,300	Principled Evaluation of Differentially Private Algorithms using DPBench	2016	SIGMOD	8.7833594e-05
4,029	Differential Privacy in Telco Big Data Platform	2015	VLDB	6.946445e-05

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