Sinew: A SQL System for Multi-Structured Data

Summary: Sinew is a SQL system for multi-structured data, preserving SQL access while embracing JSON-based formats. It stores arbitrary key-value documents in columns and exposes a dynamic relational view for standard SQL, delivering strong gains over JSON/MongoDB. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 4977
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2014
Pagerank: 9.8823494e-05
Overall Rank: 1,738 | 88.08%
DOI: 10.1145/2588555.2612183

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Daniel Tahara (Yale University)
2. Thaddeus Diamond (Hadapt)
3. Daniel J. Abadi (Hadapt; Yale University)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{tahara_sigmod14,
        title = {{Sinew: A SQL System for Multi-Structured Data}},
        author = {Tahara, Daniel and Diamond, Thaddeus and Abadi, Daniel J.},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '14},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/2588555.2612183},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2588555.2612183},
        year = {2014}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 16 of 16 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
24	Spark SQL: Relational Data Processing in Spark	2015	SIGMOD	0.00054865648
2,391	Mison: A Fast JSON Parser for Data Analytics	2017	VLDB	8.6413407e-05
2,414	Filter Before You Parse: Faster Analytics on Raw Data with Sparser	2018	VLDB	8.6078841e-05
3,638	Fast Queries Over Heterogeneous Data Through Engine Customization	2016	VLDB	7.2338361e-05
4,014	Automatic Generation of Normalized Relational Schemas from Nested Key-Value Data	2016	SIGMOD	6.956076e-05
4,069	JSON Tiles: Fast Analytics on Semi-Structured Data	2021	SIGMOD	6.9276175e-05
6,385	Exploiting Common Patterns for Tree-Structured Data	2017	SIGMOD	5.8899875e-05
7,312	Closing the functional and Performance Gap between SQL and NoSQL	2016	SIGMOD	5.6480976e-05
7,557	STEED: An Analytical Database System for TrEE-structured Data	2017	VLDB	5.599684e-05
8,682	Columnar Formats for Schemaless LSM-based Document Stores	2022	VLDB	5.3857524e-05
8,879	Native JSON Datatype Support: Maturing SQL and NoSQL convergence in Oracle Database	2020	VLDB	5.3527678e-05
9,216	Management of Flexible Schema Data in RDBMSs - Opportunities and Limitations for NoSQL	2015	CIDR	5.3051647e-05
9,893	ReCG: Bottom-Up JSON Schema Discovery Using a Repetitive Cluster-and-Generalize Framework	2024	VLDB	5.1997534e-05
10,526	TurboLynx: Schemaless Graph Engine Strikes Back for General-Purpose Analytics	2026	VLDB	5.093636e-05
11,885	Integration of Large-Scale Data Processing Systems and Traditional Parallel Database Technology	2019	VLDB	5.093636e-05
12,146	Tutorial: SQL-on-Hadoop Systems	2015	VLDB	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 10 of 10 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
51	Dremel: Interactive Analysis of Web-Scale Datasets	2010	VLDB	0.0004291425
137	Relational Databases for Querying XML Documents: Limitations and Opportunities	1999	VLDB	0.00029877792
318	Storing Semistructured Data with STORED	1999	SIGMOD	0.00021380325
872	Tenzing: A SQL Implementation On The MapReduce Framework	2011	VLDB	0.00013486409
1,021	Jaql: A Scripting Language for Large Scale Semistructured Data Analysis	2011	VLDB	0.00012606673
1,038	Storage and Querying of E-Commerce Data	2001	VLDB	0.00012476189
1,070	NoDB: Efficient Query Execution on Raw Data Files	2012	SIGMOD	0.0001232307
4,217	The Case for a Wide-Table Approach to Manage Sparse Relational Data Sets	2007	SIGMOD	6.8269451e-05
5,170	Pathfinder: XQuery—The Relational Way	2005	VLDB	6.3348421e-05
6,047	Column Stores For Wide and Sparse Data	2007	CIDR	5.9952702e-05

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1	13,562	SQL for NoSQL Databases: Déjà Vu	2015	CIDR
2	10,003	Adaptive Schema Databases	2017	CIDR
3	4,069	JSON Tiles: Fast Analytics on Semi-Structured Data	2021	SIGMOD
4	3,655	Schema Management for Document Stores	2015	VLDB
5	9,216	Management of Flexible Schema Data in RDBMSs - Opportunities and Limitations for NoSQL	2015	CIDR
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8	4,014	Automatic Generation of Normalized Relational Schemas from Nested Key-Value Data	2016	SIGMOD
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10	1,558	SchemaSQL - A Language for Interoperability in Relational Multi-database Systems	1996	VLDB