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Still Asking: How Good Are Query Optimizers, Really?

Summary: Introduces the Join Order Benchmark (JOB) and an empirical methodology to disentangle plan enumeration, cost modeling, and cardinality estimation contributions to optimizer quality. Finds pervasive cardinality-estimation errors dominate bad plans, spurring research on learned estimators, robustness, adaptive execution, and realistic workloads. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID
14197
Venue
VLDB
Year
2025
Pagerank
4.2897489e-05
Overall Rank
9,747 | 32.20%
DOI
10.14778/3750601.3760521

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Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 1 of 1 citing papers.

Rank Citing Paper Year Venue Pagerank
9,988 I Can't Believe It's Not Yannakakis: Pragmatic Bitmap Filters in Microsoft SQL Server 2026 CIDR 4.1945683e-05
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Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 35 of 35 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 0.0040449103
71 How Good Are Query Optimizers, Really? 2016 VLDB 0.00059038975
182 LEO - DB2's LEarning Optimizer 2001 VLDB 0.00036962631
204 Learned Cardinalities: Estimating Correlated Joins with Deep Learning 2019 CIDR 0.00034784455
333 Neo: A Learned Query Optimizer 2019 VLDB 0.00027206884
454 An Overview of Query Optimization in Relational Systems 1998 PODS 0.00022734812
536 The LDBC Social Network Benchmark: Interactive Workload 2015 SIGMOD 0.00020722862
608 DeepDB: Learn from Data, not from Queries! 2020 VLDB 0.00019235898
640 Bao: Making Learned Query Optimization Practical 2021 SIGMOD 0.00018759152
910 NeuroCard: One Cardinality Estimator for All Tables 2021 VLDB 0.00015423056
1,333 Optimizing Subgraph Queries by Combining Binary and Worst-Case Optimal Joins 2019 VLDB 0.00012523806
1,638 Cardinality Estimation in DBMS: A Comprehensive Benchmark Evaluation 2022 VLDB 0.00011049779
1,703 Are We Ready For Learned Cardinality Estimation? 2021 VLDB 0.00010836769
2,156 SkinnerDB: Regret-Bounded Query Evaluation via Reinforcement Learning 2018 VLDB 9.4170209e-05
2,275 Adopting Worst-Case Optimal Joins in Relational Database Systems 2020 VLDB 9.1262202e-05
2,356 Consistently Estimating the Selectivity of Conjuncts of Predicates 2005 VLDB 8.9620762e-05
2,783 Flow-Loss: Learning Cardinality Estimates That Matter 2021 VLDB 8.1293383e-05
3,266 Learned Cardinality Estimation: An In-depth Study 2022 SIGMOD 7.3074684e-05
3,668 The LDBC Social Network Benchmark: Business Intelligence Workload 2023 VLDB 6.8591612e-05
3,789 DIAMetrics: Benchmarking Query Engines at Scale 2020 VLDB 6.7644737e-05
3,924 A Unified Deep Model of Learning from both Data and Queries for Cardinality Estimation 2021 SIGMOD 6.6271553e-05
4,419 Don't Hold My Data Hostage - A Case For Client Protocol Redesign 2017 VLDB 6.2022597e-05
4,465 Robust Join Processing with Diamond Hardened Joins 2024 VLDB 6.1604282e-05
5,633 Analyzing the Impact of Cardinality Estimation on Execution Plans in Microsoft SQL Server 2023 VLDB 5.4011156e-05
5,765 Predicate Transfer: Efficient Pre-Filtering on Multi-Join Queries 2024 CIDR 5.336442e-05
5,930 FASTgres: Making Learned Query Optimizer Hinting Effective 2023 VLDB 5.2682075e-05
5,972 SafeBound: A Practical System for Generating Cardinality Bounds 2023 SIGMOD 5.2474768e-05
6,969 LpBound: Pessimistic Cardinality Estimation using ℓp-Norms of Degree Sequences 2025 SIGMOD 4.8799937e-05
7,011 Simple Adaptive Query Processing vs. Learned Query Optimizers: Observations and Analysis 2023 VLDB 4.8629458e-05
7,059 Adaptive and Robust Query Execution for Lakehouses at Scale 2024 VLDB 4.8477825e-05
7,126 Debunking the Myth of Join Ordering: Toward Robust SQL Analytics 2025 SIGMOD 4.8232367e-05
8,034 Instance-Optimal Acyclic Join Processing Without Regret: Engineering the Yannakakis Algorithm in Column Stores 2025 VLDB 4.6010599e-05
8,207 SQLStorm: Taking Database Benchmarking into the LLM Era 2025 VLDB 4.5583637e-05
8,781 Accelerate Distributed Joins with Predicate Transfer 2025 SIGMOD 4.4534753e-05
9,187 POLAR: Adaptive and Non-invasive Join Order Selection via Plans of Least Resistance 2024 VLDB 4.3780059e-05
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Overall Rank Paper Year Venue Pagerank
454 An Overview of Query Optimization in Relational Systems 1998 PODS 0.00022734812
6,685 How Good are Learned Cost Models, Really? Insights from Query Optimization Tasks 2025 SIGMOD 4.9627485e-05
3,408 Query Optimizers: Time to Rethink the Contract? 2009 SIGMOD 7.1288167e-05
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1,703 Are We Ready For Learned Cardinality Estimation? 2021 VLDB 0.00010836769
684 Towards a Robust Query Optimizer: A Principled and Practical Approach 2005 SIGMOD 0.00018179769
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