Database Cost Analysis: a Top-Down Approach

Summary: Top-down cost analysis for database design yields rapid high-level cost estimates and supports iterative refinement across alternatives. Extends hit-ratio models to nonuniform usage, introduces distribution of depths for serial accesses, and offers a unified, practitioner-friendly view of file structures. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 2119
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 1977
Pagerank: 5.093636e-05
Overall Rank: 13,283 | 8.87%
DOI: 10.1145/509404.509426

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

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Authors

1. T. H. Merrett (McGill University)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{merrett_sigmod77,
        title = {{Database Cost Analysis: a Top-Down Approach}},
        author = {Merrett, T. H.},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '77},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/509404.509426},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/509404.509426},
        year = {1977}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

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Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 5 of 5 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
854	Index Selection in a Self-Adaptive Data Base Management System	1976	SIGMOD	0.00013581028
1,479	Computing Joins Of Relations	1975	SIGMOD	0.00010649695
2,027	Application Of An Analytical Model To Evaluate Storage Structures	1976	SIGMOD	9.2876338e-05
4,388	Data Base Decomposition In A Hierarchical Computer System	1975	SIGMOD	6.7308761e-05
8,302	Secondary Index Optimization	1975	SIGMOD	5.4574671e-05

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