DBScholar

Back to papers

The Aqua Approximate Query Answering System

Summary: Aqua precomputes synopses and rewrites aggregates for fast, approximate results with probabilistic guarantees on any RDBMS. Incremental maintenance keeps synopses up to date as data changes, enabling orders-of-magnitude faster queries when precision is unnecessary. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID
3221
Venue
SIGMOD
Year
1999
Pagerank
0.00021091539
Overall Rank
327 | 97.76%
DOI
10.1145/304182.304581

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{acharya_sigmod99,
        title = {{The Aqua Approximate Query Answering System}},
        author = {Acharya, Swarup and Gibbons, Phillip B. and Poosala, Viswanath and Ramaswamy, Sridhar},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '99},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/304182.304581},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/304182.304581},
        year = {1999}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 50 of 59 citing papers.

Rank Citing Paper Year Venue Pagerank
125 Trio: A System for Integrated Management of Data, Accuracy, and Lineage 2005 CIDR 0.00030932014
136 Join Synopses for Approximate Query Answering 1999 SIGMOD 0.00030123303
255 Distinct Sampling for Highly-Accurate Answers to Distinct Values Queries and Event Reports 2001 VLDB 0.00023174541
482 An Optimal Algorithm for the Distinct Elements Problem 2010 PODS 0.00017772185
723 Dynamic Multidimensional Histograms 2002 SIGMOD 0.00014620977
772 VerdictDB: Universalizing Approximate Query Processing 2018 SIGMOD 0.00014147905
819 Quickr: Lazily Approximating Complex AdHoc Queries in BigData Clusters 2016 SIGMOD 0.00013815639
1,108 Approximate Query Processing: No Silver Bullet 2017 SIGMOD 0.00012145154
1,166 ICICLES: Self-tuning Samples for Approximate Query Answering 2000 VLDB 0.00011850439
1,198 Overview of Data Exploration Techniques 2015 SIGMOD 0.00011706307
1,392 Northstar: An Interactive Data Science System 2018 VLDB 0.00010936065
1,540 Crossing the Structure Chasm 2003 CIDR 0.00010430413
1,634 Rapid Sampling for Visualizations with Ordering Guarantees 2015 VLDB 0.00010163938
1,668 Global Optimization of Histograms 2001 SIGMOD 0.00010057026
1,736 A Sample-and-Clean Framework for Fast and Accurate Query Processing on Dirty Data 2014 SIGMOD 9.8984415e-05
1,767 IDEBench: A Benchmark for Interactive Data Exploration 2020 SIGMOD 9.805856e-05
1,799 DBEst: Revisiting Approximate Query Processing Engines with Machine Learning Models 2019 SIGMOD 9.7326398e-05
1,827 G-OLA: Generalized On-Line Aggregation for Interactive Analysis on Big Data 2015 SIGMOD 9.6690206e-05
1,872 The Analytical Bootstrap: a New Method for Fast Error Estimation in Approximate Query Processing 2014 SIGMOD 9.5759874e-05
1,962 Sample + Seek: Approximating Aggregates with Distribution Precision Guarantee 2016 SIGMOD 9.3978414e-05
1,995 Database Learning: Toward a Database that Becomes Smarter Every Time 2017 SIGMOD 9.3403665e-05
2,404 Cardinality Estimation Using Sample Views with Quality Assurance 2007 SIGMOD 8.6225576e-05
2,413 A Sampling Algebra for Aggregate Estimation 2013 VLDB 8.6116764e-05
2,633 Relational Confidence Bounds Are Easy With The Bootstrap* 2005 SIGMOD 8.3224527e-05
3,111 REHIST: Relative Error Histogram Construction Algorithms 2004 VLDB 7.7470414e-05
3,241 Optimal and Approximate Computation of Summary Statistics for Range Aggregates 2001 PODS 7.6057671e-05
3,288 I've Seen "Enough": Incrementally Improving Visualizations to Support Rapid Decision Making 2017 VLDB 7.5578177e-05
3,338 Robust Query Driven Cardinality Estimation under Changing Workloads 2023 VLDB 7.5068221e-05
3,366 AQP++: Connecting Approximate Query Processing With Aggregate Precomputation for Interactive Analytics 2018 SIGMOD 7.4748604e-05
3,370 Revisiting Reuse for Approximate Query Processing 2017 VLDB 7.4700891e-05
3,570 Davos: A System for Interactive Data-Driven Decision Making 2021 VLDB 7.3008782e-05
3,945 Exploiting Correlations for Expensive Predicate Evaluation 2015 SIGMOD 7.0055154e-05
4,126 Efficient Selection of Geospatial Data on Maps for Interactive and Visualized Exploration 2018 SIGMOD 6.8860475e-05
4,368 Lightweight and Accurate Cardinality Estimation by Neural Network Gaussian Process 2022 SIGMOD 6.7393882e-05
4,698 Rethinking Data Management for Storage-centric Sensor Networks 2007 CIDR 6.5569539e-05
4,761 Estimating arbitrary subset sums with few probes 2005 PODS 6.5196044e-05
4,819 Space efficiency in Synopsis construction algorithms 2005 VLDB 6.4940349e-05
4,926 Adaptive Sampling for Rapidly Matching Histograms 2018 VLDB 6.4428362e-05
4,945 Lightweight Cardinality Estimation in LSM-based Systems 2018 SIGMOD 6.4321265e-05
5,358 ABS: a System for Scalable Approximate Queries with Accuracy Guarantees 2014 SIGMOD 6.2492955e-05
5,669 Data Streams with Bounded Deletions 2018 PODS 6.1278944e-05
5,785 BlinkML: Efficient Maximum Likelihood Estimation with Probabilistic Guarantees 2019 SIGMOD 6.0892672e-05
6,122 iOLAP: Managing Uncertainty for Efficient Incremental OLAP 2016 SIGMOD 5.9687498e-05
6,262 Mosaic: A Sample-Based Database System for Open World Query Processing 2020 CIDR 5.9361728e-05
6,626 Tempura: A General Cost-Based Optimizer Framework for Incremental Data Processing 2021 VLDB 5.8198723e-05
7,551 Enabling Efficient and General Subpopulation Analytics in Multidimensional Data Streams 2022 VLDB 5.6006414e-05
8,204 PilotDB: Database-Agnostic Online Approximate Query Processing with A Priori Error Guarantees 2025 SIGMOD 5.4667903e-05
8,398 The DBO Database System 2008 SIGMOD 5.4342404e-05
8,616 CoopStore: Optimizing Precomputed Summaries for Aggregation 2020 VLDB 5.4004741e-05
9,245 Towards Observability for Production Machine Learning Pipelines 2022 VLDB 5.2992628e-05
Previous Page 1 / 2 Next

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 4 of 4 cited papers.

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

Rank Cited Paper Year Venue Pagerank
35 Improved Histograms for Selectivity Estimation of Range Predicates 1996 SIGMOD 0.00048481081
136 Join Synopses for Approximate Query Answering 1999 SIGMOD 0.00030123303
235 Fast Incremental Maintenance of Approximate Histograms 1997 VLDB 0.00023783792
553 Congressional Samples for Approximate Answering of Group-By Queries 2000 SIGMOD 0.00016590619
Previous Page 1 / 1 Next

Semantically Similar Papers

# Overall Rank Paper Year Venue
1 8,204 PilotDB: Database-Agnostic Online Approximate Query Processing with A Priori Error Guarantees 2025 SIGMOD
2 648 Progressive Approximate Aggregate Queries with a Multi-Resolution Tree Structure 2001 SIGMOD
3 5,943 ACID: A System for Computing Approximate Certain Query Answers over Incomplete Databases 2018 SIGMOD
4 3,366 AQP++: Connecting Approximate Query Processing With Aggregate Precomputation for Interactive Analytics 2018 SIGMOD
5 1,962 Sample + Seek: Approximating Aggregates with Distribution Precision Guarantee 2016 SIGMOD
6 10,634 Efficient Approximate Query Processing with Block Sampling 2025 CIDR
7 12,699 AQAX: A System for Approximate XML Query Answers 2006 VLDB
8 11,486 AQUA: Automatic Collaborative Query Processing in Analytical Database 2023 VLDB
9 363 Approximate Query Processing: Taming the TeraBytes! A Tutorial 2001 VLDB
10 931 Aqua: A Fast Decision Support System Using Approximate Query Answers 1999 VLDB