The Fittest Survives: An Adaptive Approach to Query Optimization

Summary: An adaptive query optimizer tunes its search space and strategy to changing conditions, rather than relying on fixed procedures. It incrementally replaces cached plans for canned queries with fitter alternatives, demonstrating gains on large multijoin workloads. (summarized by gpt-5.6-luna on Jul 24 2026)

Paper ID: 8464
Venue: VLDB
Year: 1995
Pagerank: 5.4331924e-05
Overall Rank: 8,400 | 42.37%
DOI: -

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Hongjun Lu (National University of Singapore)
2. Kian-Lee Tan (National University of Singapore)
3. Son Dao (Hughes Research Laboratories)

BibTeX Citation

@article{lu_vldb95,
        title = {{The Fittest Survives: An Adaptive Approach to Query Optimization}},
        author = {Lu, Hongjun and Tan, Kian-Lee and Dao, Son},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '95},
        year = {1995}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 2 of 2 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
4,790	A Characterization of the Sensitivity of Query Optimization to Storage Access Cost Parameters	2003	SIGMOD	6.5068083e-05
8,163	Learned Offline Query Planning via Bayesian Optimization	2025	SIGMOD	5.4751517e-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
1	Access Path Selection in a Relational Database Management System	1979	SIGMOD	0.0024089429
7	Implementation Techniques For Main Memory Database Systems	1984	SIGMOD	0.00083340894
119	The EXODUS Optimizer Generator	1987	SIGMOD	0.0003183602
289	Optimization of Dynamic Query Evaluation Plans	1994	SIGMOD	0.00022278876
316	Measuring the Complexity of Join Enumeration in Query Optimization	1990	VLDB	0.0002141607
463	Optimization of Large Join Queries	1988	SIGMOD	0.00018064961
479	Randomized Algorithms For Optimizing Large Join Queries	1990	SIGMOD	0.00017789732
708	Left-Deep Vs. Bushy Trees: An Analysis Of Strategy Spaces And Its Implications For Query Optimization	1991	SIGMOD	0.00014727576
770	Parametric Query Optimization	1992	VLDB	0.00014166811
904	Tradeoffs in Processing Complex Join Queries via Hashing in Multiprocessor Database Machines	1990	VLDB	0.00013319798
2,286	Extending the Search Strategy in a Query Optimizer	1991	VLDB	8.8044994e-05
2,512	An Architecture For Query Optimization	1982	SIGMOD	8.485242e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	2,286	Extending the Search Strategy in a Query Optimizer	1991	VLDB
2	8,615	A Spark Optimizer for Adaptive, Fine-Grained Parameter Tuning	2024	VLDB
3	2,762	Cost-based or Learning-based? A Hybrid Query Optimizer for Query Plan Selection	2022	VLDB
4	289	Optimization of Dynamic Query Evaluation Plans	1994	SIGMOD
5	3,153	Implementing an Interpreter for Functional Rules in a Query Optimizer	1988	VLDB
6	2,944	Query Optimizers: Time to Rethink the Contract?	2009	SIGMOD
7	3,003	Configuration-Parametric Query Optimization for Physical Design Tuning	2008	SIGMOD
8	290	An Overview of Query Optimization in Relational Systems	1998	PODS
9	3,988	Adaptive Query Processing in the Looking Glass	2005	CIDR
10	1,286	Adaptive Optimization of Very Large Join Queries	2018	SIGMOD