Optimizing Recursive Queries in SQL

Summary: Optimizes linear recursive SQL queries (transitive closure) via three techniques: early selection evaluation, elimination of duplicates in intermediates, and a specialized index for joins. Evaluations on binary trees and sparse graphs show notable reductions in recursive query time for graph workloads. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 3757
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2005
Pagerank: 5.3090815e-05
Overall Rank: 9,173 | 37.07%
DOI: 10.1145/1066157.1066260

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Carlos Ordonez (NCR Corporation; Teradata)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{ordonez_sigmod05,
        title = {{Optimizing Recursive Queries in SQL}},
        author = {Ordonez, Carlos},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '05},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/1066157.1066260},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1066157.1066260},
        year = {2005}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 2 of 2 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
7,891	Adaptive Optimizations of Recursive Queries in Teradata	2012	SIGMOD	5.5211516e-05
10,690	Dynamic Pruning for Recursive Joins	2025	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 3 of 3 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,788	Decidability and Undecidability Results for Boundedness of Linear Recursive Queries	1988	PODS	9.7653696e-05
4,673	Handling Redundancy in the Processing of Recursive Database Queries	1987	SIGMOD	6.573022e-05
6,613	Inherent Complexity of Recursive Queries (Extended Abstract)	1999	PODS	5.8219225e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	10,296	Succinct Structure Representations for Efficient Query Optimization	2026	SIGMOD
2	10,690	Dynamic Pruning for Recursive Joins	2025	SIGMOD
3	4,673	Handling Redundancy in the Processing of Recursive Database Queries	1987	SIGMOD
4	7,986	Optimization of Object-Oriented Recursive Queries using Cost-Controlled Strategies	1992	SIGMOD
5	4,972	On the Optimization of Recursive Relational Queries: Application to Graph Queries	2020	SIGMOD
6	129	Optimization of Nested SQL Queries Revisited	1987	SIGMOD
7	2,198	A Recursive Algebra and Query Optimization for Nested Relations	1989	SIGMOD
8	13,158	Classification Of Recursive Formulas In Deductive Databases	1988	SIGMOD
9	143	Optimization of Nonrecursive Queries	1986	VLDB
10	4,425	EFFICIENT EVALUATION FOR A SUBSET OF RECURSIVE QUERIES (Extended Abstract)	1987	PODS