Design Considerations for Data-flow Database Machines

Summary: Explores data-flow concepts for relational-algebra execution in database machines; finds nested-loops outperform sort-merge on multiprocessors. Proposes three operand-granularity levels and argues page-level granularity best balances hardware/software; presents a preliminary page-based, distributed-control design. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 2186
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 1980
Pagerank: 7.1392128e-05
Overall Rank: 3,770 | 74.14%
DOI: 10.1145/582250.582266

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Haran Boral (University of Wisconsin)
2. David J. DeWitt (University of Wisconsin)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{boral_sigmod80,
        title = {{Design Considerations for Data-flow Database Machines}},
        author = {Boral, Haran and DeWitt, David J.},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '80},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/582250.582266},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/582250.582266},
        year = {1980}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 3 of 3 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
652	An Overview of The System Software of A Parallel Relational Database Machine GRACE	1986	VLDB	0.00015304915
5,563	A Parallel Processing Strategy for Evaluating Recursive Queries	1986	VLDB	6.1716947e-05
10,059	Progressive Partitioning for Parallelized Query Execution in Google’s Napa	2023	VLDB	5.1664022e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 2 of 2 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
519	Optimizing the Performance of a Relational Algebra Database Interface	1975	SIGMOD	0.00017144967
2,170	Query Execution in DIRECT	1979	SIGMOD	9.042724e-05

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