Approximate Query Engines: Commercial Challenges and Research Opportunities

Summary: Surveys AQP in industry, highlighting deployment, planning, and interface challenges for commercial use. Identifies opportunities from reusing past work and adaptive answering, outlining directions to boost efficiency and accuracy for real-world use. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 5408
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2017
Pagerank: 6.0457047e-05
Overall Rank: 5,906 | 59.49%
DOI: 10.1145/3035918.3056098

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Barzan Mozafari (University of Michigan)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{mozafari_sigmod17,
        title = {{Approximate Query Engines: Commercial Challenges and Research Opportunities}},
        author = {Mozafari, Barzan},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '17},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/3035918.3056098},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3035918.3056098},
        year = {2017}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 14 of 14 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
772	VerdictDB: Universalizing Approximate Query Processing	2018	SIGMOD	0.00014147905
1,995	Database Learning: Toward a Database that Becomes Smarter Every Time	2017	SIGMOD	9.3403665e-05
4,926	Adaptive Sampling for Rapidly Matching Histograms	2018	VLDB	6.4428362e-05
5,601	Optimal Join Algorithms Meet Top-k	2020	SIGMOD	6.1540123e-05
5,743	Joins on Samples: A Theoretical Guide for Practitioners	2020	VLDB	6.1025457e-05
5,785	BlinkML: Efficient Maximum Likelihood Estimation with Probabilistic Guarantees	2019	SIGMOD	6.0892672e-05
8,204	PilotDB: Database-Agnostic Online Approximate Query Processing with A Priori Error Guarantees	2025	SIGMOD	5.4667903e-05
8,608	One Size Does Not Fit All: A Bandit-Based Sampler Combination Framework with Theoretical Guarantees	2022	SIGMOD	5.4024561e-05
8,724	FastPDB: Towards Bag-Probabilistic Queries at Interactive Speeds	2025	SIGMOD	5.3766157e-05
8,984	Hit the Gym: Accelerating Query Execution to Efficiently Bootstrap Behavior Models for Self-Driving Database Management Systems	2024	VLDB	5.3395569e-05
9,200	JENNER: Just-in-time Enrichment in Query Processing	2022	VLDB	5.3058708e-05
10,760	FAAQP: Fast and Accurate Approximate Query Processing based on Bitmap-augmented Sum-Product Network	2025	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
11,194	Enabling Adaptive Sampling for Intra-Window Join: Simultaneously Optimizing Quantity and Quality	2024	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
11,916	Demonstration of VerdictDB, the Platform-Independent AQP System	2018	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 17 of 17 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
9	Online Aggregation	1997	SIGMOD	0.00077458002
23	Efficiently Compiling Efficient Query Plans for Modern Hardware	2011	VLDB	0.00054886415
136	Join Synopses for Approximate Query Answering	1999	SIGMOD	0.00030123303
593	Wander Join: Online Aggregation via Random Walks	2016	SIGMOD	0.00016027871
931	Aqua: A Fast Decision Support System Using Approximate Query Answers	1999	VLDB	0.00013125812
1,009	Online Aggregation for Large MapReduce Jobs	2011	VLDB	0.00012684342
1,401	Knowing When You’re Wrong: Building Fast and Reliable Approximate Query Processing Systems	2014	SIGMOD	0.00010889902
1,827	G-OLA: Generalized On-Line Aggregation for Interactive Analysis on Big Data	2015	SIGMOD	9.6690206e-05
1,931	Performance and Resource Modeling in Highly-Concurrent OLTP Workloads	2013	SIGMOD	9.4664741e-05
1,995	Database Learning: Toward a Database that Becomes Smarter Every Time	2017	SIGMOD	9.3403665e-05
2,206	DAQ: A New Paradigm for Approximate Query Processing	2015	VLDB	8.957715e-05
2,868	SnappyData: A Unified Cluster for Streaming, Transactions, and Interactive Analytics	2017	CIDR	8.0156936e-05
3,157	Turbo-Charging Estimate Convergence in DBO	2009	VLDB	7.6911286e-05
4,000	DBSeer: Resource and Performance Prediction for Building a Next Generation Database Cloud	2013	CIDR	6.9666198e-05
5,222	CliffGuard: A Principled Framework for Finding Robust Database Designs	2015	SIGMOD	6.3103741e-05
5,700	SnappyData: A Hybrid Transactional Analytical Store Built On Spark	2016	SIGMOD	6.1167342e-05
13,555	Verdict: A System for Stochastic Query Planning	2015	CIDR	-

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1	10,634	Efficient Approximate Query Processing with Block Sampling	2025	CIDR
2	10,342	Approximate Query Processing under Updates	2026	SIGMOD
3	363	Approximate Query Processing: Taming the TeraBytes! A Tutorial	2001	VLDB
4	9,760	Approximate Query Processing for Interactive Data Science	2017	SIGMOD
5	12,216	When Data Management Systems Meet Approximate Hardware: Challenges and Opportunities	2014	VLDB
6	4,789	Learned Approximate Query Processing: Make it Light, Accurate and Fast	2021	CIDR
7	6,206	Combining Aggregation and Sampling (Nearly) Optimally for Approximate Query Processing	2021	SIGMOD
8	6,107	Adaptive Query Processing: Why, How, When, What Next	2006	SIGMOD
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