Optimizing Queries on Files

Summary: Unifies data access across databases and files into a single framework for uniform manipulation. Shows that text indexing with novel optimization yields a high-level, file-centric interface and can outperform standard DB queries; tradeoff between indexing effort and speed. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: h43066b23ec1b61c1
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 1994
Pagerank: 8.1877616e-05
Overall Rank: 2,637 | 82.28%
DOI: 10.1145/191839.191898

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Mariano P. Consens (University of Waterloo)
2. Tova Milo (University of Toronto)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{consens_sigmod94,
        title = {{Optimizing Queries on Files}},
        author = {Consens, Mariano P. and Milo, Tova},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '94},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/191839.191898},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/191839.191898},
        year = {1994}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 11 of 11 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
178	Holistic Twig Joins: Optimal XML Pattern Matching	2002	SIGMOD	0.00026628894
1,234	A Comprehensive XQuery to SQL Translation using Dynamic Interval Encoding	2003	SIGMOD	0.00011405864
2,286	Join Queries with External Text Sources: Execution and Optimization Techniques	1995	SIGMOD	8.6942645e-05
3,662	A Database Interface for File Update	1995	SIGMOD	7.1191086e-05
4,156	Twig2Stack: Bottom-up Processing of Generalized-Tree-Pattern Queries over XML Documents	2006	VLDB	6.774434e-05
4,383	From Region Encoding To Extended Dewey: On Efficient Processing of XML Twig Pattern Matching	2005	VLDB	6.6261511e-05
4,434	OdeFS: A File System Interface to an Object-Oriented Database	1994	VLDB	6.6014433e-05
5,763	Algebras for Querying Text Regions (Extended Abstract)	1995	PODS	6.0035367e-05
9,514	Tree-Pattern Queries on a Lightweight XML Processor	2005	VLDB	5.1692468e-05
12,906	The Data Ring: Community Content Sharing	2007	CIDR	4.9793485e-05
13,298	Type Classification of Semi-Structured Documents	1995	VLDB	4.9793485e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 7 of 7 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
144	A Language Facility for Designing Interactive Database-Intensive Applications	1978	SIGMOD	0.00029097107
297	GraphLog: a Visual Formalism for Real Life Recursion	1990	PODS	0.00021840374
413	Querying Object-Oriented Databases	1992	SIGMOD	0.00018681401
1,021	Querying and Updating the File	1993	VLDB	0.0001243944
1,312	Mind Your Grammar: a New Approach to Modelling Text	1987	VLDB	0.0001106293
2,622	The Rufus System: Information Organization for Semi-Structured Data	1993	VLDB	8.2118212e-05
4,006	Hy+: A Hygraph-based Query and Visualization System	1993	SIGMOD	6.8593128e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	3,951	Cracking the Database Store	2005	CIDR
2	13,413	Indexing in a Hypertext Database	1990	VLDB
3	1,448	Fast Incremental Indexing for Full-Text Information Retrieval	1994	VLDB
4	13,047	Efficiently Processing Queries on Interval-and-Value Tuples in Relational Databases	2005	VLDB
5	1,925	Here are my Data Files. Here are my Queries. Where are my Results?	2011	CIDR
6	2,286	Join Queries with External Text Sources: Execution and Optimization Techniques	1995	SIGMOD
7	1,527	On the Analysis of Indexing Schemes	1997	PODS
8	441	A Fast Index for Semistructured Data	2001	VLDB
9	1,021	Querying and Updating the File	1993	VLDB
10	1,624	An Efficient Indexing Technique for Full-Text Database Systems	1992	VLDB