Fast Approximate Similarity Join in Vector Databases

Summary: SimJoin exploits join-window reuse to speed up approximate similarity joins in vector databases, beating per-point range queries. Join-window order optimization, k-similarity support, and a proximity-graph index; experiments show large speedups. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 7353
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2025
Pagerank: 5.3251649e-05
Overall Rank: 9,052 | 37.90%
DOI: 10.1145/3725403

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Jiadong Xie (Chinese University of Hong Kong)
2. Jeffrey Xu Yu (Chinese University of Hong Kong)
3. Yingfan Liu (Xidian University)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{xie_sigmod25,
        title = {{Fast Approximate Similarity Join in Vector Databases}},
        author = {Xie, Jiadong and Yu, Jeffrey Xu and Liu, Yingfan},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '25},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/3725403},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3725403},
        year = {2025}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 1 of 1 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
10,418	MorphingDB: A Task-Centric AI-Native DBMS for Model Management and Inference	2026	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
93	Fast Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search With The Navigating Spreading-out Graph	2019	VLDB	0.00034701237
145	Efficient Processing of Spatial Joins Using R-trees	1993	SIGMOD	0.00029548428
286	Milvus: A Purpose-Built Vector Data Management System	2021	SIGMOD	0.00022357911
398	A Comprehensive Survey and Experimental Comparison of Graph-Based Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search	2021	VLDB	0.00019194947
1,244	Efficient Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search in Multi-dimensional Databases	2023	SIGMOD	0.00011508159
1,357	RaBitQ: Quantizing High-Dimensional Vectors with a Theoretical Error Bound for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search	2024	SIGMOD	0.00011043994
1,415	V-SMART-Join: A Scalable MapReduce Framework for All-Pair Similarity Joins of Multisets and Vectors	2012	VLDB	0.00010840141
1,993	Epsilon Grid Order: An Algorithm for the Similarity Join on Massive High-Dimensional Data	2001	SIGMOD	9.3421788e-05
2,390	Streaming Similarity Search over one Billion Tweets using Parallel Locality-Sensitive Hashing	2013	VLDB	8.6438351e-05
2,462	Output-optimal Parallel Algorithms for Similarity Joins	2017	PODS	8.5487602e-05
4,712	Revisiting the Index Construction of Proximity Graph-Based Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search	2025	VLDB	6.5506649e-05
7,715	Cache-oblivious High-performance Similarity Join	2019	SIGMOD	5.5606224e-05

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#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	6,906	Efficient Similarity Join and Search on Multi-Attribute Data	2015	SIGMOD
2	3,073	DeepJoin: Joinable Table Discovery with Pre-trained Language Models	2023	VLDB
3	3,040	Leveraging Set Relations in Exact Set Similarity Join	2017	VLDB
4	9,471	Efficient and Accurate SimRank-based Similarity Joins: Experiments, Analysis, and Improvement	2024	VLDB
5	200	Efficient set joins on similarity predicates	2004	SIGMOD
6	11,149	Similarity Joins of Sparse Features	2024	SIGMOD
7	10,359	DiskJoin: Large-scale Vector Similarity Join with SSD	2026	SIGMOD
8	10,951	Extensible and Robust Evaluation of Similarity Queries	2025	VLDB
9	13,672	Exploiting Database Similarity Joins for Metric Spaces	2012	VLDB
10	4,061	Efficient Top-K SimRank-based Similarity Join	2015	VLDB