Towards Theory for Real-World Data

Summary: Advocates grounding theory of data‑manipulation languages in empirical analysis of real datasets, schemas, and query logs to expose recurrent structures and frequently co‑used features in tree/graph data. Surveys practical studies and distills lessons from >850M queries to identify tractable fragments, common optimization opportunities, and usability gaps that should guide language design and theory. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 1889
Venue: PODS
Year: 2022
Pagerank: 5.3323444e-05
Overall Rank: 9,012 | 38.17%
DOI: 10.1145/3517804.3526066

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Wim Martens (University of Bayreuth)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{martens_pods22,
        address = {New York, NY, USA},
        series = {{PODS} '22},
        title = {{Towards Theory for Real-World Data}},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3517804.3526066},
        doi = {10.1145/3517804.3526066},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} Symposium on {Principles} of {Database} {Systems}},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        author = {Martens, Wim},
        year = {2022}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 2 of 2 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
9,811	Schema-Based Query Optimisation for Graph Databases	2025	SIGMOD	5.214913e-05
9,973	Exploiting Structure in Regular Expression Queries	2023	SIGMOD	5.1845938e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 17 of 17 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
312	A Graphical Query Language Supporting Recursion	1987	SIGMOD	0.00021733819
395	Containment and Equivalence for an XPath Fragment [Extended Abstract]	2002	PODS	0.00019298983
530	An Analytical Study of Large SPARQL Query Logs	2018	VLDB	0.0001709169
747	Querying Graph Databases	2013	PODS	0.00014400452
1,758	Validating Streaming XML Documents	2002	PODS	9.8162828e-05
1,836	Graph Pattern Matching in GQL and SQL/PGQ	2022	SIGMOD	9.6489549e-05
2,472	Path Queries on Compressed XML	2003	VLDB	8.5327655e-05
2,861	PG-Keys: Keys for Property Graphs	2021	SIGMOD	8.0212883e-05
3,185	Inference of Concise DTDs from XML Data	2006	VLDB	7.6567423e-05
3,287	JSON: Data model, Query languages and Schema specification	2017	PODS	7.5587639e-05
4,069	JSON Tiles: Fast Analytics on Semi-Structured Data	2021	SIGMOD	6.9276175e-05
4,981	A Trichotomy for Regular Simple Path Queries on Graphs	2013	PODS	6.4127882e-05
7,327	Reducing Ambiguity in Json Schema Discovery	2021	SIGMOD	5.6435519e-05
7,928	BonXai: Combining the simplicity of DTD with the expressiveness of XML Schema	2015	PODS	5.5181056e-05
9,249	Decidable XPath Fragments in the Real World	2019	PODS	5.2987261e-05
9,961	Threshold Queries in Theory and in the Wild	2022	VLDB	5.1879626e-05
10,043	SHARQL: Shape Analysis of Recursive SPARQL Queries	2020	SIGMOD	5.1703259e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	8,358	Exploring the Data Wilderness through Examples	2019	SIGMOD
2	5,916	Tables As a Paradigm for Querying and Restructuring	1996	PODS
3	294	Graphs-at-a-time: Query Language and Access Methods for Graph Databases	2008	SIGMOD
4	11,067	Machine Learning for Graph Data Management and Query Processing	2025	VLDB
5	3,239	Keyword Search on Structured and Semi-Structured Data	2009	SIGMOD
6	13,022	Tutorial: Languages for Collection Types	1994	PODS
7	8,920	Full-Power Graph Querying: State of the Art and Challenges	2023	VLDB
8	6,387	Modern Techniques for Querying Graph-Structured Relations: Foundations, System Implementations, and Open Challenges	2022	VLDB
9	9,682	Graph Data Models, Query Languages and Programming Paradigms	2018	VLDB
10	4,107	Processing Queries on Tree-Structured Data Efficiently	2006	PODS