Sloth: Being Lazy is a Virtue (When Issuing Database Queries)

Summary: Sloth extends lazy evaluation to expose cross-control-flow query batching during application execution. No manual hints or static analysis; up to 3x page-load-time reduction on 100+ benchmarks from two large open-source apps by delaying computation. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 4864
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2014
Pagerank: 7.0361352e-05
Overall Rank: 3,900 | 73.25%
DOI: 10.1145/2588555.2593672

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Alvin Cheung (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
2. Samuel Madden (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
3. Armando Solar-Lezama (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{cheung_sigmod14,
        title = {{Sloth: Being Lazy is a Virtue (When Issuing Database Queries)}},
        author = {Cheung, Alvin and Madden, Samuel and Solar-Lezama, Armando},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '14},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/2588555.2593672},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2588555.2593672},
        year = {2014}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 10 of 10 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
2,154	Leveraging Lock Contention to Improve OLTP Application Performance	2016	VLDB	9.0745745e-05
2,651	Magpie: Python at Speed and Scale using Cloud Backends	2021	CIDR	8.2918086e-05
2,717	Implicit Parallelism through Deep Language Embedding	2015	SIGMOD	8.2102313e-05
3,985	Transaction Healing: Scaling Optimistic Concurrency Control on Multicores	2016	SIGMOD	6.9738485e-05
4,082	SQLCheck: Automated Detection and Diagnosis of SQL Anti-Patterns	2020	SIGMOD	6.9164719e-05
5,991	Iterative Query Processing based on Unified Optimization Techniques	2019	SIGMOD	6.0171458e-05
6,475	WeBridge: Synthesizing Stored Procedures for Large-Scale Real-World Web Applications	2024	SIGMOD	5.8687157e-05
6,684	CrocodileDB: Efficient Database Execution through Intelligent Deferment	2020	CIDR	5.8036476e-05
9,986	Thriving in the No Man’s Land between Compilers and Databases	2019	CIDR	5.1832796e-05
11,739	View-Driven Optimization of Database-Backed Web Applications	2020	CIDR	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 6 of 6 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
670	SharedDB: Killing One Thousand Queries With One Stone	2012	VLDB	0.00015157572
1,261	Rewriting Procedures for Batched Bindings	2008	VLDB	0.0001143305
2,941	Automatic Partitioning of Database Applications	2012	VLDB	7.937125e-05
5,759	Holistic Optimization by Prefetching Query Results	2012	SIGMOD	6.0962298e-05
6,273	Optimization of Query Streams Using Semantic Prefetching	2004	SIGMOD	5.9317551e-05
6,725	Quantum Databases	2013	CIDR	5.7921261e-05

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