AJoin: Ad-hoc Stream Joins at Scale

Summary: AJoin is a dynamic, incremental ad-hoc stream-join framework that interleaves runtime plan reoptimization (reordering, scaling) with a pipeline-parallel processing engine. Implemented on Apache Flink, it enables continuous optimization-driven execution and outperforms Flink on multi-query and single-query workloads. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: h17280ec293f7d87c
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2020
Pagerank: 5.4070928e-05
Overall Rank: 8,014 | 46.12%
DOI: 10.14778/3372716.3372718

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Jeyhun Karimov (German National Research Center for Information Technology)
2. Tilmann Rabl (Hasso Plattner Institute; University of Potsdam)
3. Volker Markl (German National Research Center for Information Technology; Technical University of Berlin)

BibTeX Citation

@article{karimov_vldb20,
        title = {{AJoin: Ad-hoc Stream Joins at Scale}},
        author = {Karimov, Jeyhun and Rabl, Tilmann and Markl, Volker},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '20},
        volume = {13},
        number = {4},
        pages = {435--448},
        doi = {10.14778/3372716.3372718},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/3372716.3372718},
        year = {2020}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 6 of 6 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
6,217	Materialization and Reuse Optimizations for Production Data Science Pipelines	2022	SIGMOD	5.8474357e-05
7,722	Resource-efficient Shared Query Execution via Exploiting Time Slackness	2021	SIGMOD	5.467573e-05
8,560	Efficient Incrementialization of Correlated Nested Aggregate Queries using Relative Partial Aggregate Indexes (RPAI)	2022	SIGMOD	5.3142933e-05
10,773	Incremental Stream Query Deployment under Continuous Infrastructure Changes in the Cloud-Edge Continuum	2026	VLDB	4.9793485e-05
11,175	AJOSC: Adaptive Join Order Selection for Continuous Queries	2025	SIGMOD	4.9793485e-05
11,461	Oligolithic Cross-task Optimizations across Isolated Workloads*	2024	CIDR	4.9793485e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 26 of 26 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	0.0023947656
23	Spark SQL: Relational Data Processing in Spark	2015	SIGMOD	0.00055406774
26	Models and Issues in Data Stream Systems	2002	PODS	0.00052121228
53	Eddies: Continuously Adaptive Query Processing	2000	SIGMOD	0.00040860054
143	Optimization of Nonrecursive Queries	1986	VLDB	0.00029179719
231	Storm @Twitter	2014	SIGMOD	0.00023841089
481	Robust Query Processing through Progressive Optimization	2004	SIGMOD	0.00017603972
667	SharedDB: Killing One Thousand Queries With One Stone	2012	VLDB	0.00014978213
884	Dynamic Programming Strikes Back	2008	SIGMOD	0.00013267935
1,034	A Scalable, Predictable Join Operator for Highly Concurrent Data Warehouses	2009	VLDB	0.00012394538
1,040	The DataPath System: A Data-Centric Analytic Processing Engine for Large Data Warehouses	2010	SIGMOD	0.00012364063
1,108	Maximizing the Output Rate of Multi-Way Join Queries over Streaming Information Sources	2003	VLDB	0.00011991195
1,123	Structured Streaming: A Declarative API for Real-Time Applications in Apache Spark	2018	SIGMOD	0.0001193233
1,241	BatchDB: Efficient Isolated Execution of Hybrid OLTP+OLAP Workloads for Interactive Applications	2017	SIGMOD	0.00011378254
1,402	State Management in Apache Flink: Consistent Stateful Distributed Stream Processing	2017	VLDB	0.00010771949
2,225	Shared Workload Optimization	2014	VLDB	8.8081001e-05
2,782	Scheduling for shared window joins over data streams	2003	VLDB	8.0252514e-05
3,122	Analytics in Motion: High Performance Event-Processing AND Real-Time Analytics in the Same Database	2015	SIGMOD	7.6236292e-05
3,139	Solving the Join Ordering Problem via Mixed Integer Linear Programming	2017	SIGMOD	7.6046928e-05
3,922	Analyzing Efficient Stream Processing on Modern Hardware	2019	VLDB	6.9229432e-05
4,011	Deployment of Query Plans on Multicores	2015	VLDB	6.8573269e-05
4,730	MQJoin: Efficient Shared Execution of Main-Memory Joins	2016	VLDB	6.4468007e-05
5,829	FluxQuery: An Execution Framework for Highly Interactive Query Workloads	2016	SIGMOD	5.9783397e-05
6,225	Providing Streaming Joins as a Service at Facebook	2018	VLDB	5.8455305e-05
6,599	AStream: Ad-hoc Shared Stream Processing	2019	SIGMOD	5.7404438e-05
7,790	Workload Optimization using SharedDB	2013	SIGMOD	5.4521545e-05

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#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	1,431	Approximate Join Processing Over Data Streams	2003	SIGMOD
2	3,636	Advanced Join Strategies for Large-Scale Distributed Computation	2014	VLDB
3	1,034	A Scalable, Predictable Join Operator for Highly Concurrent Data Warehouses	2009	VLDB
4	6,225	Providing Streaming Joins as a Service at Facebook	2018	VLDB
5	6,123	Parallel Index-based Stream Join on a Multicore CPU	2020	SIGMOD
6	1,108	Maximizing the Output Rate of Multi-Way Join Queries over Streaming Information Sources	2003	VLDB
7	11,525	Low-Latency Adaptive Distributed Stream Join System Based on a Flexible Join Model	2024	SIGMOD
8	2,953	Scalable and Adaptive Online Joins	2014	VLDB
9	3,603	Scalable Distributed Stream Join Processing	2015	SIGMOD
10	6,599	AStream: Ad-hoc Shared Stream Processing	2019	SIGMOD