Scalable Discovery of Unique Column Combinations

Summary: Ducc discovers all unique and non-unique column combinations by framing uniqueness as graph coloring and combining hybrid lattice traversal with row-based pruning. Parallel scale-up/out enables million-row, hundreds-attribute datasets, outperforming prior methods by up to 631×. (summarized by gpt-5.6-luna on Jul 24 2026)

Paper ID: h44e03e140ef1dad4
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2014
Pagerank: 6.6958006e-05
Overall Rank: 4,245 | 71.55%
DOI: 10.14778/2732240.2732247
PDF: Download (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Arvid Heise (Hasso Plattner Institute)
2. Jorge-Arnulfo Quiane-Ruiz (Qatar Computing Research Institute)
3. Ziawasch Abedjan (Hasso Plattner Institute)
4. Anja Jentzsch (Hasso Plattner Institute)
5. Felix Naumann (Hasso Plattner Institute)

BibTeX Citation

@article{heise_vldb14,
        title = {{Scalable Discovery of Unique Column Combinations}},
        author = {Heise, Arvid and Quiane-Ruiz, Jorge-Arnulfo and Abedjan, Ziawasch and Jentzsch, Anja and Naumann, Felix},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '14},
        volume = {7},
        number = {4},
        pages = {301--312},
        doi = {10.14778/2732240.2732247},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/2732240.2732247},
        year = {2014}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 17 of 17 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,399	Data Profiling with Metanome	2015	VLDB	0.0001076306
1,490	Efficient Discovery of Approximate Dependencies	2018	VLDB	0.0001047928
1,627	Efficient Denial Constraint Discovery with Hydra	2018	VLDB	0.00010021689
1,980	Discovery of Approximate (and Exact) Denial Constraints	2020	VLDB	9.2527187e-05
3,420	Data Profiling – A Tutorial	2017	SIGMOD	7.300051e-05
3,432	UGuide – User-Guided Discovery of FD-Detectable Errors	2017	SIGMOD	7.288198e-05
4,361	Possible and Certain SQL Keys	2015	VLDB	6.6271978e-05
5,041	MATE: Multi-Attribute Table Extraction	2022	VLDB	6.2899676e-05
5,303	Fast Approximate Denial Constraint Discovery	2023	VLDB	6.1758652e-05
6,438	CtxPipe: Context-aware Data Preparation Pipeline Construction for Machine Learning	2024	SIGMOD	5.7678369e-05
6,877	Fast Incremental Discovery of Pointwise Order Dependencies	2020	VLDB	5.6429454e-05
8,227	Hitting Set Enumeration with Partial Information for Unique Column Combination Discovery	2020	VLDB	5.3583309e-05
8,285	Discovery and Ranking of Embedded Uniqueness Constraints	2019	VLDB	5.3454563e-05
8,784	Exploratory Training: When Annotators Learn About Data	2023	SIGMOD	5.2640635e-05
9,654	Interactive and Deterministic Data Cleaning: A Tossed Stone Raises a Thousand Ripples	2016	SIGMOD	5.1310198e-05
11,381	How and Why False Denial Constraints are Discovered	2025	VLDB	4.9605343e-05
12,069	A Demonstration of RELIC: A System for REtrospective Lineage InferenCe of Data Workflows	2021	VLDB	4.9605343e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 9 of 9 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
70	The End of an Architectural Era (It’s Time for a Complete Rewrite)	2007	VLDB	0.00037761637
160	CORDS: Automatic Discovery of Correlations and Soft Functional Dependencies	2004	SIGMOD	0.00027775994
502	Dependencies Revisited for Improving Data Quality	2008	PODS	0.00017239652
1,033	On Generating Near-Optimal Tableaux for Conditional Functional Dependencies	2008	VLDB	0.00012373297
1,297	Extending Dependencies with Conditions	2007	VLDB	0.00011118907
1,538	On Multi-Column Foreign Key Discovery	2010	VLDB	0.00010295575
1,670	BHUNT: Automatic Discovery of Fuzzy Algebraic Constraints in Relational Data	2003	VLDB	9.9124313e-05
2,305	GORDIAN: Efficient and Scalable Discovery of Composite Keys	2006	VLDB	8.6550507e-05
2,914	Estimating the Confidence of Conditional Functional Dependencies	2009	SIGMOD	7.85486e-05

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