The Case for Learned Index Structures

Summary: Indexes treated as models; learned indexes proposed as replacements for B-Tree, Hash, and Bitmap indexes. The paper analyzes theoretical conditions under which learned indexes outperform traditional ones and reports initial results, signaling ML-driven data management as a design paradigm. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 5555
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2018
Pagerank: 0.00049545203
Overall Rank: 102 | 99.30%
DOI: 10.1145/3183713.3196909

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 50 of 206 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
7,620	Learning to Optimize LSM-trees: Towards A Reinforcement Learning based Key-Value Store for Dynamic Workloads	2023	SIGMOD	4.693568e-05
7,630	Evaluating Persistent Memory Range Indexes: Part Two	2022	VLDB	4.6923637e-05
7,631	A Progress Report on DBOS: A Database-oriented Operating System	2022	CIDR	4.6917915e-05
7,654	LiteHST: A Tree Embedding based Method for Similarity Search	2023	SIGMOD	4.687476e-05
7,655	Machine Learning for Cloud Data Systems: the Progress so far and the Path Forward	2021	VLDB	4.6872456e-05
7,663	Optimizing Collections of Bloom Filters within a Space Budget	2024	VLDB	4.6857816e-05
7,832	LIDER: An Efficient High-dimensional Learned Index for Large-scale Dense Passage Retrieval	2023	VLDB	4.6387029e-05
7,869	SALI: A Scalable Adaptive Learned Index Framework based on Probability Models	2023	SIGMOD	4.6315248e-05
7,894	LITS: An Optimized Learned Index for Strings	2024	VLDB	4.6240341e-05
7,990	Blueprinting the Cloud: Unifying and Automatically Optimizing Cloud Data Infrastructures with BRAD	2024	VLDB	4.6117441e-05
8,009	CAMAL: Optimizing LSM-trees via Active Learning	2024	SIGMOD	4.6066863e-05
8,076	Accelerating String-key Learned Index Structures via Memoization-based Incremental Training	2024	VLDB	4.5917398e-05
8,101	Hyper: A High-Performance and Memory-Efficient Learned Index via Hybrid Construction	2024	SIGMOD	4.5854141e-05
8,220	PerfGuard: Deploying ML-for-Systems without Performance Regressions, Almost!	2021	VLDB	4.5557328e-05
8,222	Sieve: A Learned Data-Skipping Index for Data Analytics	2023	VLDB	4.5555621e-05
8,346	Deep Learning: Systems and Responsibility	2021	SIGMOD	4.5420668e-05
8,359	Waffle: A Workload-Aware and Query-Sensitive Framework for Disk-Based Spatial Indexing	2023	VLDB	4.5372925e-05
8,384	Consistent and Flexible Selectivity Estimation for High-Dimensional Data	2021	SIGMOD	4.5304673e-05
8,405	Towards Designing and Learning Piecewise Space-Filling Curves	2023	VLDB	4.5224126e-05
8,414	The next 50 Years in Database Indexing or: The Case for Automatically Generated Index Structures	2022	VLDB	4.5203005e-05
8,416	Towards Building Autonomous Data Services on Azure	2023	SIGMOD	4.5196199e-05
8,417	The Case for Learned In-Memory Joins	2023	VLDB	4.5194164e-05
8,434	Time Series Representation for Visualization in Apache IoTDB	2024	SIGMOD	4.5141748e-05
8,442	SageDB: An Instance-Optimized Data Analytics System	2022	VLDB	4.5120602e-05
8,447	Cabin: a Compressed Adaptive Binned Scan Index	2024	SIGMOD	4.5102052e-05
8,525	Aleph Filter: To Infinity in Constant Time	2024	VLDB	4.4937074e-05
8,627	Limousine: Blending Learned and Classical Indexes to Self-Design Larger-than-Memory Cloud Storage Engines	2024	SIGMOD	4.4829101e-05
8,634	Building Fast and Compact Sketches for Approximately Multi-Set Multi-Membership Querying	2021	SIGMOD	4.4801584e-05
8,636	WISK: A Workload-aware Learned Index for Spatial Keyword Queries	2023	SIGMOD	4.4801284e-05
8,650	HAP: An Efficient Hamming Space Index Based on Augmented Pigeonhole Principle	2022	SIGMOD	4.4761716e-05
8,655	Adaptive Hybrid Indexes	2022	SIGMOD	4.4739554e-05
8,671	Algorithmic Complexity Attacks on Dynamic Learned Indexes	2024	VLDB	4.4714076e-05
8,672	Optimizing Video Selection LIMIT Queries With Commonsense Knowledge	2024	VLDB	4.4710897e-05
8,688	NeurDB: On the Design and Implementation of an AI-powered Autonomous Database	2025	CIDR	4.4673127e-05
8,720	Entropy-Learned Hashing: Constant Time Hashing with Controllable Uniformity	2022	SIGMOD	4.4609699e-05
8,811	Tuning Hierarchical Learned Indexes on Disk and Beyond	2022	SIGMOD	4.4441574e-05
8,847	Towards Foundation Database Models	2025	CIDR	4.4371897e-05
8,948	One Seed, Two Birds: A Unified Learned Structure for Exact and Approximate Counting	2024	SIGMOD	4.423786e-05
8,984	The Past, Present and Future of Indexing on Persistent Memory	2022	VLDB	4.4157721e-05
9,095	AirIndex: Versatile Index Tuning Through Data and Storage	2023	SIGMOD	4.3975034e-05
9,120	Deep Query Optimization	2019	SIGMOD	4.392741e-05
9,123	External Merge Sort for Top-K Queries: Eager input filtering guided by histograms	2020	SIGMOD	4.3920263e-05
9,187	POLAR: Adaptive and Non-invasive Join Order Selection via Plans of Least Resistance	2024	VLDB	4.3780059e-05
9,218	Diva: Dynamic Range Filter for Var-Length Keys and Queries	2025	VLDB	4.3702863e-05
9,230	LeaFi: Data Series Indexes on Steroids with Learned Filters	2025	SIGMOD	4.3690661e-05
9,345	LIMAO: A Framework for Lifelong Modular Learned Query Optimization	2025	VLDB	4.3536343e-05
9,346	Can Learned Indexes be Built Efficiently? A Deep Dive into Sampling Trade-offs	2024	SIGMOD	4.3532026e-05
9,397	Outback: Fast and Communication-efficient Index for Key-Value Store on Disaggregated Memory	2025	VLDB	4.3441378e-05
9,404	Revisiting B-tree Compression: An Experimental Study	2024	SIGMOD	4.3441378e-05
9,605	Waffle: In-memory Grid Index for Moving Objects with Reinforcement Learning-based Configuration Tuning System	2022	VLDB	4.3177432e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 18 of 18 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
32	Differential Files: Their Application To The Maintenance Of Large Data Bases	1976	SIGMOD	0.00077486306
44	The Design Of Postgres	1986	SIGMOD	0.00071838587
103	Making B+-Trees Cache Conscious in Main Memory	2000	SIGMOD	0.00049150032
233	A Study of Index Structures for Main Memory Database Management Systems	1986	VLDB	0.00032021526
368	Small Materialized Aggregates: A Light Weight Index Structure for Data Warehousing	1998	VLDB	0.000254931
381	FAST: Fast Architecture Sensitive Tree Search on Modern CPUs and GPUs	2010	SIGMOD	0.00024873637
720	Building a Database on S3	2008	SIGMOD	0.00017615431
1,213	RDF-3X: a RISC-style Engine for RDF	2008	VLDB	0.0001325231
1,312	Reducing the Storage Overhead of Main-Memory OLTP Databases with Hybrid Indexes	2016	SIGMOD	0.00012652548
1,471	Adaptive Range Filters for Cold Data: Avoiding Trips to Siberia	2013	VLDB	0.00011830111
1,696	A Seven-Dimensional Analysis of Hashing Methods and its Implications on Query Processing	2016	VLDB	0.00010881034
1,711	SCADS: Scale-Independent Storage for Social Computing Applications	2009	CIDR	0.0001080509
1,819	The End of a Myth: Distributed Transactions Can Scale	2017	VLDB	0.00010429773
1,873	An Architecture for Compiling UDF-centric Workflows	2015	VLDB	0.00010253002
1,913	BF-Tree: Approximate Tree Indexing	2014	VLDB	0.00010113937
3,777	A Hybrid B+-tree as Solution for In-Memory Indexing on CPU-GPU Heterogeneous Computing Platforms	2016	SIGMOD	6.7750901e-05
3,912	Two Birds, One Stone: A Fast, yet Lightweight, Indexing Scheme for Modern Database Systems	2017	VLDB	6.6354964e-05
4,897	The Wavelet Trie: Maintaining an Indexed Sequence of Strings in Compressed Space	2012	PODS	5.8469152e-05

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Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
8,811	Tuning Hierarchical Learned Indexes on Disk and Beyond	2022	SIGMOD	4.4441574e-05
5,157	Hist-Tree: Those Who Ignore It Are Doomed to Learn	2021	CIDR	5.6589595e-05
9,746	Why Are Learned Indexes So Effective but Sometimes Ineffective?	2025	VLDB	4.2897489e-05
6,445	Updatable Learned Indexes Meet Disk-Resident DBMS - From Evaluations to Design Choices	2023	SIGMOD	5.0589805e-05
2,552	Updatable Learned Index with Precise Positions	2021	VLDB	8.5530411e-05
4,128	Are Updatable Learned Indexes Ready?	2022	VLDB	6.4292373e-05
2,678	Effectively Learning Spatial Indices	2020	VLDB	8.3252088e-05
7,390	Making In-Memory Learned Indexes Efficient on Disk	2024	SIGMOD	4.7431654e-05
5,074	Learned Index: A Comprehensive Experimental Evaluation	2023	VLDB	5.7175726e-05
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