The Accuracy of Cardinality Estimators: Unraveling the Evaluation Result Conundrum

Summary: Introduces a multidimensional, discretization-based framework to aggregate and compare cardinality-estimator results across diverse datasets, resolving contradictory per-dataset conclusions via customizable rankings. Benchmarking 2-D range queries exposes weaknesses in both learned and traditional estimators. (summarized by gpt-5.6-luna on Jul 24 2026)

Paper ID: 14185
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2025
Pagerank: 5.093636e-05
Overall Rank: 10,945 | 24.91%
DOI: 10.14778/3749646.3749651

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

No non-self incoming citations found for this paper in this database.

Authors

1. Nazanin Rashedi (University of Mannheim)
2. Guido Moerkotte (University of Mannheim)

BibTeX Citation

@article{rashedi_vldb25,
        title = {{The Accuracy of Cardinality Estimators: Unraveling the Evaluation Result Conundrum}},
        author = {Rashedi, Nazanin and Moerkotte, Guido},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '25},
        volume = {18},
        number = {11},
        pages = {3744--3756},
        doi = {10.14778/3749646.3749651},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/3749646.3749651},
        year = {2025}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 0 of 0 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 14 of 14 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
2	R-Trees: A Dynamic Index Structure For Spatial Searching	1984	SIGMOD	0.0020210012
18	How Good Are Query Optimizers, Really?	2016	VLDB	0.00059284255
84	Learned Cardinalities: Estimating Correlated Joins with Deep Learning	2019	CIDR	0.00035838391
323	DeepDB: Learn from Data, not from Queries!	2020	VLDB	0.00021264788
388	Preventing Bad Plans by Bounding the Impact of Cardinality Estimation Errors	2009	VLDB	0.00019410042
401	Deep Unsupervised Cardinality Estimation	2020	VLDB	0.00019092557
697	Selectivity Estimation for Range Predicates using Lightweight Models	2019	VLDB	0.00014888851
1,061	Are We Ready For Learned Cardinality Estimation?	2021	VLDB	0.00012369764
1,122	Cardinality Estimation in DBMS: A Comprehensive Benchmark Evaluation	2022	VLDB	0.0001209124
2,723	Learned Cardinality Estimation: A Design Space Exploration and A Comparative Evaluation	2022	VLDB	8.2049453e-05
5,010	Analyzing the Impact of Cardinality Estimation on Execution Plans in Microsoft SQL Server	2023	VLDB	6.4023732e-05
6,009	Optimization of Conjunctive Predicates for Main Memory Column Stores	2016	VLDB	6.0113733e-05
6,704	ASM: Harmonizing Autoregressive Model, Sampling, and Multi-dimensional Statistics Merging for Cardinality Estimation	2024	SIGMOD	5.797374e-05
8,986	One Seed, Two Birds: A Unified Learned Structure for Exact and Approximate Counting	2024	SIGMOD	5.3387783e-05

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