A Method for Optimizing Opaque Filter Queries

Summary: Proposes voodoo indexing for opaque filter queries with unknown UDF semantics. Offline, builds a query-independent hierarchical index; online, maps group satisfaction to accelerate execution without in-query training, delivering up to 88% speedup over scans and 79% over prior best. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 6043
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2020
Pagerank: 6.7937529e-05
Overall Rank: 4,264 | 70.75%
DOI: 10.1145/3318464.3389766

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Wenjia He (University of Michigan)
2. Michael R. Anderson (University of Michigan)
3. Maxwell Strome (University of Michigan)
4. Michael Cafarella (University of Michigan)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{he_sigmod20,
        title = {{A Method for Optimizing Opaque Filter Queries}},
        author = {He, Wenjia and Anderson, Michael R. and Strome, Maxwell and Cafarella, Michael},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '20},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/3318464.3389766},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3318464.3389766},
        year = {2020}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 12 of 12 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,892	Procedural Extensions of SQL: Understanding their usage in the wild	2021	VLDB	9.5277793e-05
4,007	Optimizing Video Analytics with Declarative Model Relationships	2023	VLDB	6.9632395e-05
4,045	Logical and Physical Optimizations for SQL Query Execution over Large Language Models	2025	SIGMOD	6.9394654e-05
5,789	Seiden: Revisiting Query Processing in Video Database Systems	2023	VLDB	6.0874367e-05
6,494	Extract-Transform-Load for Video Streams	2023	VLDB	5.8639535e-05
8,362	EQUI-VOCAL: Synthesizing Queries for Compositional Video Events from Limited User Interactions	2023	VLDB	5.4432545e-05
8,589	Optimizing Video Selection LIMIT Queries With Commonsense Knowledge	2024	VLDB	5.4065627e-05
9,406	Controlled Intentional Degradation in Analytical Video Systems	2022	SIGMOD	5.2751448e-05
9,464	Self-Enhancing Video Data Management System for Compositional Events with Large Language Models	2025	SIGMOD	5.2634238e-05
9,881	The Image Calculator: 10x Faster Image-AI Inference by Replacing JPEG with Self-designing Storage Format	2024	SIGMOD	5.2040783e-05
10,670	MAST: Towards Efficient Analytical Query Processing on Point Cloud Data	2025	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
10,751	Approximating Opaque Top-k Queries	2025	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 12 of 12 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
43	The Case for Learned Index Structures	2018	SIGMOD	0.00046060254
84	Learned Cardinalities: Estimating Correlated Joins with Deep Learning	2019	CIDR	0.00035838391
132	Predicate Migration: Optimizing Queries with Expensive Predicates	1993	SIGMOD	0.00030378624
259	Database Cracking	2007	CIDR	0.00023119313
284	NoScope: Optimizing Neural Network Queries over Video at Scale	2017	VLDB	0.00022370521
295	Accelerating Machine Learning Inference with Probabilistic Predicates	2018	SIGMOD	0.00022238183
363	Approximate Query Processing: Taming the TeraBytes! A Tutorial	2001	VLDB	0.0002005475
894	Froid: Optimization of Imperative Programs in a Relational Database	2018	VLDB	0.00013367658
1,257	Automatic Optimization for MapReduce Programs	2011	VLDB	0.000114432
1,815	SkinnerDB: Regret-Bounded Query Evaluation via Reinforcement Learning	2018	VLDB	9.6894541e-05
2,164	Opening the Black Boxes in Data Flow Optimization	2012	VLDB	9.0521951e-05
2,281	Selectivity Estimation in Extensible Databases - A Neural Network Approach	1998	VLDB	8.8129279e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	7,750	DISTILL: Low-Overhead Data-Driven Techniques for Filtering and Costing Indexes for Scalable Index Tuning	2022	VLDB
2	7,176	Interactive Demonstration of Probabilistic Predicates	2018	SIGMOD
3	2,865	End-to-end Optimization of Machine Learning Prediction Queries	2022	SIGMOD
4	11,624	Accelerating Queries over Unstructured Data with ML	2021	CIDR
5	11,166	PLAQUE: Automated Predicate Learning at Query Time	2024	SIGMOD
6	4,532	Stacked Filters: Learning to Filter by Structure	2021	VLDB
7	10,751	Approximating Opaque Top-k Queries	2025	SIGMOD
8	9,882	Demonstration of Accelerating Machine Learning Inference Queries with Correlative Proxy Models	2022	VLDB
9	4,114	Optimizing Machine Learning Inference Queries with Correlative Proxy Models	2022	VLDB
10	295	Accelerating Machine Learning Inference with Probabilistic Predicates	2018	SIGMOD