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)
Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time
Authors
- 1. Swarup Acharya (AT&T)
- 2. Phillip B. Gibbons (AT&T)
- 3. Viswanath Poosala (AT&T)
- 4. Sridhar Ramaswamy (AT&T; Epiphany Inc.)
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 9 of 59 citing papers.
| Rank | Citing Paper | Year | Venue | Pagerank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10,865 | Approximation-First Timeseries Query At Scale | 2025 | VLDB | 5.093636e-05 |
| 11,531 | The White-Box Adversarial Data Stream Model | 2022 | PODS | 5.093636e-05 |
| 11,627 | Leam: An Interactive System for In-situ Visual Text Analysis | 2021 | CIDR | 5.093636e-05 |
| 11,736 | FlashP: An Analytical Pipeline for Real-time Forecasting of Time-Series Relational Data | 2021 | VLDB | 5.093636e-05 |
| 11,749 | BitGourmet: Deterministic Approximation via Optimized Bit Selection | 2020 | CIDR | 5.093636e-05 |
| 11,781 | Demonstration of BitGourmet: Data Analysis via Deterministic Approximation | 2020 | SIGMOD | 5.093636e-05 |
| 11,886 | Enabling Data Science for the Majority | 2019 | VLDB | 5.093636e-05 |
| 12,034 | Streaming Algorithms for Robust Distinct Elements | 2016 | SIGMOD | 5.093636e-05 |
| 12,699 | AQAX: A System for Approximate XML Query Answers | 2006 | VLDB | 5.093636e-05 |
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 |
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