Management of Flexible Schema Data in RDBMSs - Opportunities and Limitations for NoSQL

Summary: Advocates managing Flexible Schema Data (FSD)—data‑first semi/unstructured, rapidly evolving records—inside RDBMSs rather than large optional schemas or wholesale NoSQL migration. Outlines engineering practices, limitations, and research opportunities to unify structured and FSD workloads. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 277
Venue: CIDR
Year: 2015
Pagerank: 5.3051647e-05
Overall Rank: 9,216 | 36.78%
DOI: -

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Zhen Hua Liu (Oracle)
2. Dieter Gawlick (Oracle)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{liu_cidr15,
        address = {Amsterdam, Netherlands},
        series = {{CIDR} '15},
        title = {{Management of Flexible Schema Data in RDBMSs - Opportunities and Limitations for NoSQL}},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {Conference} on {Innovative} {Data} {Systems} {Research}},
        author = {Liu, Zhen Hua and Gawlick, Dieter},
        year = {2015}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 6 of 6 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
4,069	JSON Tiles: Fast Analytics on Semi-Structured Data	2021	SIGMOD	6.9276175e-05
5,971	Lenses: An On-Demand Approach to ETL	2015	VLDB	6.0243066e-05
7,293	JSON Relational Duality: A Revolutionary Combination of Document, Object, and Relational Models	2025	SIGMOD	5.6533762e-05
7,312	Closing the functional and Performance Gap between SQL and NoSQL	2016	SIGMOD	5.6480976e-05
10,003	Adaptive Schema Databases	2017	CIDR	5.1814573e-05
11,356	Zed: Leveraging Data Types to Process Eclectic Data	2023	CIDR	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 15 of 15 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
12	C-Store: A Column-oriented DBMS	2005	VLDB	0.00069513174
48	DataGuides: Enabling Query Formulation and Optimization in Semistructured Databases	1997	VLDB	0.00044033592
51	Dremel: Interactive Analysis of Web-Scale Datasets	2010	VLDB	0.0004291425
60	Integrating Compression and Execution in Column-Oriented Database Systems	2006	SIGMOD	0.0003955489
1,038	Storage and Querying of E-Commerce Data	2001	VLDB	0.00012476189
1,738	Sinew: A SQL System for Multi-Structured Data	2014	SIGMOD	9.8823494e-05
1,854	Towards a One Size Fits All Database Architecture	2011	CIDR	9.6069414e-05
2,051	Designing a Generalized NF2 Model with an SQL-Type Language Interface	1986	VLDB	9.2538701e-05
2,800	JSON Data Management – Supporting Schema-less Development in RDBMS	2014	SIGMOD	8.1124117e-05
3,414	Managing Expressions as Data in Relational Database Systems	2003	CIDR	7.4313224e-05
4,822	Colorful XML: One Hierarchy Isn't Enough	2004	SIGMOD	6.4919484e-05
6,627	Schema-free SQL	2014	SIGMOD	5.8198662e-05
7,276	From X100 to Vectorwise: Opportunities, Challenges and Things Most Researchers do not Think About	2012	SIGMOD	5.6582613e-05
8,600	Query Rewrite for XML in Oracle XML DB	2004	VLDB	5.4049137e-05
9,352	Querying Virtual Hierarchies using Virtual Prefix-Based Numbers	2014	SIGMOD	5.2831061e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	8,109	Relational Support for Flexible Schema Scenarios	2008	VLDB
2	13,059	Incremental Database Systems: Databases from the Ground Up	1993	SIGMOD
3	1,558	SchemaSQL - A Language for Interoperability in Relational Multi-database Systems	1996	VLDB
4	10,995	Towards Principled, Practical Document Database Design	2025	VLDB
5	13,562	SQL for NoSQL Databases: Déjà Vu	2015	CIDR
6	3,655	Schema Management for Document Stores	2015	VLDB
7	10,003	Adaptive Schema Databases	2017	CIDR
8	4,217	The Case for a Wide-Table Approach to Manage Sparse Relational Data Sets	2007	SIGMOD
9	7,312	Closing the functional and Performance Gap between SQL and NoSQL	2016	SIGMOD
10	2,800	JSON Data Management – Supporting Schema-less Development in RDBMS	2014	SIGMOD