Optimizing Queries on Files

Summary: Unifies data access across databases and files into a single framework for uniform manipulation. Shows that text indexing with novel optimization yields a high-level, file-centric interface and can outperform standard DB queries; tradeoff between indexing effort and speed. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 2797
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 1994
Pagerank: 8.3742403e-05
Overall Rank: 2,588 | 82.25%
DOI: 10.1145/191839.191898

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Mariano P. Consens (University of Waterloo)
2. Tova Milo (University of Toronto)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{consens_sigmod94,
        title = {{Optimizing Queries on Files}},
        author = {Consens, Mariano P. and Milo, Tova},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '94},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/191839.191898},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/191839.191898},
        year = {1994}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 11 of 11 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
175	Holistic Twig Joins: Optimal XML Pattern Matching	2002	SIGMOD	0.00027226333
1,204	A Comprehensive XQuery to SQL Translation using Dynamic Interval Encoding	2003	SIGMOD	0.00011664562
2,244	Join Queries with External Text Sources: Execution and Optimization Techniques	1995	SIGMOD	8.8737737e-05
3,588	A Database Interface for File Update	1995	SIGMOD	7.281669e-05
4,066	Twig2Stack: Bottom-up Processing of Generalized-Tree-Pattern Queries over XML Documents	2006	VLDB	6.9298871e-05
4,294	From Region Encoding To Extended Dewey: On Efficient Processing of XML Twig Pattern Matching	2005	VLDB	6.7780241e-05
4,352	OdeFS: A File System Interface to an Object-Oriented Database	1994	VLDB	6.7491841e-05
5,635	Algebras for Querying Text Regions (Extended Abstract)	1995	PODS	6.1408026e-05
9,338	Tree-Pattern Queries on a Lightweight XML Processor	2005	VLDB	5.2874872e-05
12,616	The Data Ring: Community Content Sharing	2007	CIDR	5.093636e-05
13,008	Type Classification of Semi-Structured Documents	1995	VLDB	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 7 of 7 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
139	A Language Facility for Designing Interactive Database-Intensive Applications	1978	SIGMOD	0.00029742792
300	GraphLog: a Visual Formalism for Real Life Recursion	1990	PODS	0.00022046803
403	Querying Object-Oriented Databases	1992	SIGMOD	0.0001907249
1,001	Querying and Updating the File	1993	VLDB	0.00012714843
1,289	Mind Your Grammar: a New Approach to Modelling Text	1987	VLDB	0.00011314
2,574	The Rufus System: Information Organization for Semi-Structured Data	1993	VLDB	8.3995947e-05
3,922	Hy+: A Hygraph-based Query and Visualization System	1993	SIGMOD	7.016223e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	3,876	Cracking the Database Store	2005	CIDR
2	13,123	Indexing in a Hypertext Database	1990	VLDB
3	1,407	Fast Incremental Indexing for Full-Text Information Retrieval	1994	VLDB
4	12,757	Efficiently Processing Queries on Interval-and-Value Tuples in Relational Databases	2005	VLDB
5	1,927	Here are my Data Files. Here are my Queries. Where are my Results?	2011	CIDR
6	2,244	Join Queries with External Text Sources: Execution and Optimization Techniques	1995	SIGMOD
7	1,512	On the Analysis of Indexing Schemes	1997	PODS
8	430	A Fast Index for Semistructured Data	2001	VLDB
9	1,001	Querying and Updating the File	1993	VLDB
10	1,587	An Efficient Indexing Technique for Full-Text Database Systems	1992	VLDB