The Case for a Wide-Table Approach to Manage Sparse Relational Data Sets

Summary: Argues sparsity across hundreds of attributes is best handled with a single wide table, not sparse schemas. Proposes facilities for multi-attribute queries and fast processing on wide sparse tables, enabling self-managing DBs by reducing schema overhead. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 3965
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2007
Pagerank: 6.8269451e-05
Overall Rank: 4,217 | 71.07%
DOI: 10.1145/1247480.1247571

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Eric Chu (University of Wisconsin)
2. Jennifer Beckmann (Microsoft; University of Wisconsin)
3. Jeffrey Naughton (University of Wisconsin)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{chu_sigmod07,
        title = {{The Case for a Wide-Table Approach to Manage Sparse Relational Data Sets}},
        author = {Chu, Eric and Beckmann, Jennifer and Naughton, Jeffrey},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '07},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/1247480.1247571},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1247480.1247571},
        year = {2007}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 6 of 6 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
944	RDF-3X: a RISC-style Engine for RDF	2008	VLDB	0.00013067088
1,738	Sinew: A SQL System for Multi-Structured Data	2014	SIGMOD	9.8823494e-05
2,724	A Relational Approach to Incrementally Extracting and Querying Structure in Unstructured Data	2007	VLDB	8.2048095e-05
8,109	Relational Support for Flexible Schema Scenarios	2008	VLDB	5.4843869e-05
8,186	A Comparison of Flexible Schemas for Software as a Service	2009	SIGMOD	5.4705133e-05
12,366	Schema-As-You-Go: On Probabilistic Tagging and Querying of Wide Tables	2011	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 5 of 5 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
37	DISCOVER: Keyword Search in Relational Databases	2002	VLDB	0.00048017193
156	An Efficient, Cost-Driven Index Selection Tool for Microsoft SQL Server	1997	VLDB	0.00028636811
496	Schema-Free XQuery	2004	VLDB	0.0001750537
1,038	Storage and Querying of E-Commerce Data	2001	VLDB	0.00012476189

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