Rethinking SIMD Vectorization for In-Memory Databases

Summary: Novel SIMD vectorized operators for in-memory DBs using gathers/scatters (selections, hashes, partitioning, sorting, joins). On MIC Xeon Phi and mainstream CPUs, up to 10x faster than prior work; highlights algorithmic and power-efficiency implications across simple vs. complex cores. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 5102
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2015
Pagerank: 0.00015533814
Overall Rank: 634 | 95.66%
DOI: 10.1145/2723372.2747645

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Orestis Polychroniou (Columbia University)
2. Arun Raghavan (Oracle)
3. Kenneth A. Ross (Columbia University)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{polychroniou_sigmod15,
        title = {{Rethinking SIMD Vectorization for In-Memory Databases}},
        author = {Polychroniou, Orestis and Raghavan, Arun and Ross, Kenneth A.},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '15},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/2723372.2747645},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2723372.2747645},
        year = {2015}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 50 of 51 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
941	Data Blocks: Hybrid OLTP and OLAP on Compressed Storage using both Vectorization and Compilation	2016	SIGMOD	0.00013078348
1,265	An Experimental Comparison of Thirteen Relational Equi-Joins in Main Memory	2016	SIGMOD	0.00011415709
1,379	Relaxed Operator Fusion for In-Memory Databases: Making Compilation, Vectorization, and Prefetching Work Together At Last	2018	VLDB	0.00010970894
1,466	A Study of the Fundamental Performance Characteristics of GPUs and CPUs for Database Analytics	2020	SIGMOD	0.0001068941
1,469	Voodoo - A Vector Algebra for Portable Database Performance on Modern Hardware	2016	VLDB	0.00010678751
1,494	Procella: Unifying serving and analytical data at YouTube	2019	VLDB	0.00010577585
1,824	Photon: A Fast Query Engine for Lakehouse Systems	2022	SIGMOD	9.6734544e-05
1,975	Morton Filters: Faster, Space-Efficient Cuckoo Filters via Biasing, Compression, and Decoupled Logical Sparsity	2018	VLDB	9.3645236e-05
2,023	Decomposed Bounded Floats for Fast Compression and Queries	2021	VLDB	9.2950046e-05
2,823	Query Processing on Tensor Computation Runtimes	2022	VLDB	8.0893814e-05
2,848	GPL: A GPU-based Pipelined Query Processing Engine	2016	SIGMOD	8.0538815e-05
2,937	Column Sketches: A Scan Accelerator for Rapid and Robust Predicate Evaluation	2018	SIGMOD	7.9435581e-05
2,962	To Partition, or Not to Partition, That is the Join Question in a Real System	2021	SIGMOD	7.9170451e-05
3,592	The FastLanes Compression Layout: Decoding >100 Billion Integers per Second with Scalar Code	2023	VLDB	7.2774889e-05
3,598	Access Path Selection in Main-Memory Optimized Data Systems: Should I Scan or Should I Probe?	2017	SIGMOD	7.2718988e-05
3,644	CoroBase: Coroutine-Oriented Main-Memory Database Engine	2021	VLDB	7.2306862e-05
3,653	ClickHouse - Lightning Fast Analytics for Everyone	2024	VLDB	7.2241143e-05
3,791	Hardware-conscious Query Processing in GPU-accelerated Analytical Engines	2019	CIDR	7.1235328e-05
4,483	Accelerating Raw Data Analysis with the ACCORDA Software and Hardware Architecture	2019	VLDB	6.6724044e-05
4,535	Triton Join: Efficiently Scaling to a Large Join State on GPUs with Fast Interconnects	2022	SIGMOD	6.6419266e-05
4,840	FPGA-based Data Partitioning	2017	SIGMOD	6.483442e-05
5,512	BinDex: A Two-Layered Index for Fast and Robust Scans	2020	SIGMOD	6.1913331e-05
5,536	Database Processing-in-Memory: An Experimental Study	2020	VLDB	6.1822684e-05
5,765	Charting the Design Space of Query Execution using VOILA	2021	VLDB	6.0953705e-05
6,161	Data Partitioning for In-Memory Systems: Myths, Challenges, and Opportunities	2019	CIDR	5.9537202e-05
6,277	Rethinking MIMD-SIMD Interplay for Analytical Query Processing in In-Memory Database Engines	2025	CIDR	5.9288764e-05
6,665	MorphStore: Analytical Query Engine with a Holistic Compression-Enabled Processing Model	2020	VLDB	5.8089595e-05
7,139	Selection Pushdown in Column Stores using Bit Manipulation Instructions	2023	SIGMOD	5.6932481e-05
7,150	BSX : Subgraph Matching with Batch Backtracking Search	2025	SIGMOD	5.687428e-05
7,242	Fast Multi-Column Sorting in Main-Memory Column-Stores	2016	SIGMOD	5.6641994e-05
7,287	Is Perfect Hashing Practical for OLAP Systems?	2024	CIDR	5.6544795e-05
7,666	Hardware-Oblivious SIMD Parallelism for In-Memory Column-Stores	2020	CIDR	5.57179e-05
7,899	Modularis: Modular Relational Analytics over Heterogeneous Distributed Platforms	2021	VLDB	5.5195553e-05
7,919	Stackless Processing of Streamed Trees	2021	PODS	5.5181056e-05
8,238	Interleaved Multi-Vectorizing	2020	VLDB	5.4599422e-05
8,370	Cabin: a Compressed Adaptive Binned Scan Index	2024	SIGMOD	5.4409293e-05
8,443	Analyzing Vectorized Hash Tables Across CPU Architectures	2023	VLDB	5.4243766e-05
8,636	Adaptive Code Generation for Data-Intensive Analytics	2021	VLDB	5.3954959e-05
8,862	Composable Data Management: An Execution Overview	2024	VLDB	5.3554382e-05
9,100	Chasing Similarity: Distribution-aware Aggregation Scheduling	2019	VLDB	5.3250075e-05
9,333	Efficiently Joining Large Relations on Multi-GPU Systems	2025	VLDB	5.2887551e-05
9,806	BIPie: Fast Selection and Aggregation on Encoded Data using Operator Specialization	2018	SIGMOD	5.2155434e-05
10,468	LiveBin: A Localized and Version-Aware Binned Scan Index	2026	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
10,662	Data Chunk Compaction in Vectorized Execution	2025	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
10,985	Scaling GPU-Accelerated Databases beyond GPU Memory Size	2025	VLDB	5.093636e-05
11,030	GraphAr: An Efficient Storage Scheme for Graph Data in Data Lakes	2025	VLDB	5.093636e-05
11,116	Program your (custom) SIMD instruction set on FPGA in C++	2024	CIDR	5.093636e-05
11,208	Automating Vectorized Distributed Graph Computation	2024	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
11,296	Simple (yet Efficient) Function Authoring for Vectorized Engines	2024	VLDB	5.093636e-05
12,044	Efficient Query Processing on Many-core Architectures: A Case Study with Intel Xeon Phi Processor	2016	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 21 of 21 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
14	MonetDB/X100: Hyper-Pipelining Query Execution	2005	CIDR	0.0006312782
23	Efficiently Compiling Efficient Query Plans for Modern Hardware	2011	VLDB	0.00054886415
29	Database Architecture Optimized for the New Bottleneck: Memory Access	1999	VLDB	0.00052093615
165	DB2 with BLU Acceleration: So Much More than Just a Column Store	2013	VLDB	0.00027693424
209	Sort vs. Hash Revisited: Fast Join Implementation on Modern Multi-Core CPUs	2009	VLDB	0.00024932174
216	SIMD-Scan: Ultra Fast in-Memory Table Scan using on-Chip Vector Processing Units	2009	VLDB	0.00024498128
241	Morsel-Driven Parallelism: A NUMA-Aware Query Evaluation Framework for the Many-Core Age	2014	SIGMOD	0.00023654664
252	Multi-Core, Main-Memory Joins: Sort vs. Hash Revisited	2014	VLDB	0.00023242719
278	FAST: Fast Architecture Sensitive Tree Search on Modern CPUs and GPUs	2010	SIGMOD	0.00022476841
293	Implementing Database Operations Using SIMD Instructions	2002	SIGMOD	0.00022259273
360	Design and Evaluation of Main Memory Hash Join Algorithms for Multi-core CPUs	2011	SIGMOD	0.00020182846
423	Massively Parallel Sort-Merge Joins in Main Memory Multi-Core Database Systems	2012	VLDB	0.00018725853
678	Fast Sort on CPUs and GPUs: A Case for Bandwidth Oblivious SIMD Sort	2010	SIGMOD	0.00015061068
712	Efficient Implementation of Sorting on Multi-Core SIMD CPU Architecture	2008	VLDB	0.0001468812
987	What happens during a Join? Dissecting CPU and Memory Optimization Effects	2000	VLDB	0.00012814017
1,177	A Comprehensive Study of Main-Memory Partitioning and its Application to Large-Scale Comparison- and Radix-Sort	2014	SIGMOD	0.00011808761
1,507	Column Imprints: A Secondary Index Structure	2013	SIGMOD	0.0001054177
3,406	Cache-Conscious Radix-Decluster Projections	2004	VLDB	7.4392655e-05
3,435	Improving Main Memory Hash Joins on Intel Xeon Phi Processors: An Experimental Approach	2015	VLDB	7.4172582e-05
8,962	Automatic Contention Detection and Amelioration for Data-Intensive Operations	2010	SIGMOD	5.3435928e-05

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#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	8,238	Interleaved Multi-Vectorizing	2020	VLDB
2	712	Efficient Implementation of Sorting on Multi-Core SIMD CPU Architecture	2008	VLDB
3	649	Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Compiled and Vectorized Queries But Were Afraid to Ask	2018	VLDB
4	8,443	Analyzing Vectorized Hash Tables Across CPU Architectures	2023	VLDB
5	5,536	Database Processing-in-Memory: An Experimental Study	2020	VLDB
6	216	SIMD-Scan: Ultra Fast in-Memory Table Scan using on-Chip Vector Processing Units	2009	VLDB
7	7,666	Hardware-Oblivious SIMD Parallelism for In-Memory Column-Stores	2020	CIDR
8	6,277	Rethinking MIMD-SIMD Interplay for Analytical Query Processing in In-Memory Database Engines	2025	CIDR
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