Evolution of a Compiling Query Engine

Summary: Evolution of a compiling query engine based on data-centric code generation, delivering compact, efficient query code. Also discusses low-latency compilation, multi-threading, and the production challenges needed to bring compiling systems to scale. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: h4293dee841170499
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2021
Pagerank: 6.1009218e-05
Overall Rank: 5,475 | 63.31%
DOI: 10.14778/3476311.3476410
PDF: Download (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Thomas Neumann (Technical University of Munich)

BibTeX Citation

@article{neumann_vldb21,
        title = {{Evolution of a Compiling Query Engine}},
        author = {Neumann, Thomas},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '21},
        volume = {14},
        number = {12},
        pages = {3207--3210},
        doi = {10.14778/3476311.3476410},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/3476311.3476410},
        year = {2021}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 6 of 6 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
3,066	The LDBC Social Network Benchmark: Business Intelligence Workload	2023	VLDB	7.6714389e-05
6,688	Composable Data Management: An Execution Overview	2024	VLDB	5.6925768e-05
7,487	Membrane - Safe and Performant Data Access Controls in Apache Spark in the Presence of Imperative Code	2024	VLDB	5.4995746e-05
9,729	The UDFBench Benchmark for General-purpose UDF Queries	2025	VLDB	5.1202393e-05
11,724	mutable: A Modern DBMS for Research and Fast Prototyping	2023	CIDR	4.9605343e-05
11,829	Big Data Analytic Toolkit: A general-purpose, modular, and heterogeneous acceleration toolkit for data analytical engines	2023	VLDB	4.9605343e-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
14	MonetDB/X100: Hyper-Pipelining Query Execution	2005	CIDR	0.00063972112
21	Efficiently Compiling Efficient Query Plans for Modern Hardware	2011	VLDB	0.00056737487
27	Database Architecture Optimized for the New Bottleneck: Memory Access	1999	VLDB	0.0005146739
208	EmptyHeaded: A Relational Engine for Graph Processing	2016	SIGMOD	0.00024929198
215	Morsel-Driven Parallelism: A NUMA-Aware Query Evaluation Framework for the Many-Core Age	2014	SIGMOD	0.00024554257
375	Umbra: A Disk-Based System with In-Memory Performance	2020	CIDR	0.00019660459
420	Cypher: An Evolving Query Language for Property Graphs	2018	SIGMOD	0.00018489392
606	Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Compiled and Vectorized Queries But Were Afraid to Ask	2018	VLDB	0.00015609823
1,350	Relaxed Operator Fusion for In-Memory Databases: Making Compilation, Vectorization, and Prefetching Work Together At Last	2018	VLDB	0.00010934877
2,258	Evaluating End-to-End Optimization for Data Analytics Applications in Weld	2018	VLDB	8.7387151e-05
5,787	Database Technology for the Masses: Sub-Operators as First-Class Entities	2021	VLDB	5.9768075e-05
7,887	Building Advanced SQL Analytics From Low-Level Plan Operators	2021	SIGMOD	5.4162508e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	2,433	How to Architect a Query Compiler, Revisited	2018	SIGMOD
2	8,230	Architecting a Query Compiler for Spatial Workloads	2020	SIGMOD
3	291	Optimization of Dynamic Query Evaluation Plans	1994	SIGMOD
4	21	Efficiently Compiling Efficient Query Plans for Modern Hardware	2011	VLDB
5	606	Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Compiled and Vectorized Queries But Were Afraid to Ask	2018	VLDB
6	498	Building Efficient Query Engines in a High-Level Language	2014	VLDB
7	8,701	Adaptive Code Generation for Data-Intensive Analytics	2021	VLDB
8	10,228	Towards Unifying Query Interpretation and Compilation	2023	CIDR
9	4,544	Just-in-time compilation for SQL query processing	2013	VLDB
10	1,756	How to Architect a Query Compiler	2016	SIGMOD