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How Good Are Query Optimizers, Really?

Summary: Introduces the Join Order Benchmark (JOB) to test optimizer components on real-world, multi-join workloads. Cardinality estimators are error-prone; cost models matter less than estimates; exhaustive dynamic programming improves plan quality over heuristics under poor cardinality. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID
h476371500a44338b
Venue
VLDB
Year
2016
Pagerank
0.00061463175
Overall Rank
15 | 99.91%
DOI
10.14778/2850583.2850594
PDF
Download (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

BibTeX Citation

@article{leis_vldb16,
        title = {{How Good Are Query Optimizers, Really?}},
        author = {Leis, Viktor and Gubichev, Andrey and Mirchev, Atanas and Boncz, Peter and Kemper, Alfons and Neumann, Thomas},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '16},
        volume = {9},
        number = {3},
        pages = {204--215},
        doi = {10.14778/2850583.2850594},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/2850583.2850594},
        year = {2016}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 50 of 333 citing papers.

Rank Citing Paper Year Venue Pagerank
10,327 Data-Agnostic Cardinality Learning from Imperfect Workloads 2025 VLDB 5.0241309e-05
10,339 Data Chunk Compaction in Vectorized Execution 2025 SIGMOD 5.0210286e-05
10,355 SSCard: Substring Cardinality Estimation using Suffix Tree-Guided Learned FM-Index 2026 SIGMOD 5.0156513e-05
10,370 An Elephant Under The Microscope: Analyzing The Interaction Of Optimizer Components In PostgreSQL 2025 SIGMOD 5.0010514e-05
10,392 E-LQO: A Comprehensive Energy Evaluation Framework for Learned Query Optimization 2027 SIGMOD 4.9605343e-05
10,393 EASE: Resource-aware Query Scheduling across Heterogeneous Cloud Compute Services 2027 SIGMOD 4.9605343e-05
10,401 InferQ: A Database-Oriented Benchmark for Quantum Circuits Simulation 2027 SIGMOD 4.9605343e-05
10,435 I Can't Believe It's Not Yannakakis: Pragmatic Bitmap Filters in Microsoft SQL Server 2026 CIDR 4.9605343e-05
10,443 Size Bound-Adorned Datalog 2026 PODS 4.9605343e-05
10,479 A Backend-Agnostic Compiler for Approximate Query Processing with Probabilistic Tensor Algebra 2026 SIGMOD 4.9605343e-05
10,484 AgenticScholar: Agentic Data Management with Pipeline Orchestration for Scholarly Corpora 2026 SIGMOD 4.9605343e-05
10,490 Are Learned DBMS Components Robust to Workload Drift?: [Experiments & Analysis] 2026 SIGMOD 4.9605343e-05
10,512 Detecting Join Bugs in Database Engines via Join Implication Reasoning 2026 SIGMOD 4.9605343e-05
10,525 EncoderForge: Generating Efficient SQL for Encoders in Machine Learning Inference Pipelines 2026 SIGMOD 4.9605343e-05
10,529 Factorized and Vectorized Execution: Optimizing Analytical and Semantic Queries over Relations 2026 SIGMOD 4.9605343e-05
10,561 NeurBench: A Benchmark Suite for Learned Database Components with Drift Modeling: [Experiments & Analysis] 2026 SIGMOD 4.9605343e-05
10,590 Towards Selecting Informative Alternative Relational Query Plans for Database Education 2026 SIGMOD 4.9605343e-05
10,608 Rainbow: Risk-aware Index Benefit Estimation Facing Out Of Distribution Workloads 2026 SIGMOD 4.9605343e-05
10,610 SieveSketch: A Fine-grained and Adaptive Sketch Framework for Accurate Frequency Estimation 2026 SIGMOD 4.9605343e-05
10,620 Approximate Query Processing under Updates 2026 SIGMOD 4.9605343e-05
10,653 MCTuner: Spatial Decomposition-Enhanced Database Tuning via LLM-Guided Exploration 2026 SIGMOD 4.9605343e-05
10,663 Query Optimization for Database-Returning Queries 2026 SIGMOD 4.9605343e-05
10,668 SEFRQO: A Self-Evolving Fine-Tuned RAG-Based Query Optimizer 2026 SIGMOD 4.9605343e-05
10,676 Understanding and Detecting Query Performance Regression in Practical Index Tuning: [Experiments & Analysis] 2026 SIGMOD 4.9605343e-05
10,705 Divo: Learning a Stable and Effective Query Optimizer with a Diverse Workload 2026 SIGMOD 4.9605343e-05
10,725 InferF: Declarative Factorization of AI/ML Inferences over Joins 2026 SIGMOD 4.9605343e-05
10,751 Reqo: A Comprehensive Learning-Based Cost Model for Robust and Explainable Query Optimization 2026 SIGMOD 4.9605343e-05
10,764 Practical Parameterized Query Optimization via Efficient Plan Reuse and List-wise Ranking 2026 SIGMOD 4.9605343e-05
10,769 LIO: A lightweight and interpretable query optimizer based on an evolutionary forest 2026 VLDB 4.9605343e-05
10,771 Sample-based Distinct Cardinality Estimation for Multiple Attributes in Multi-Dataset Queries 2026 VLDB 4.9605343e-05
10,784 Robust Predicate Transfer with Dynamic Execution 2026 VLDB 4.9605343e-05
10,812 OBELISK: Efficient Offline Query Planning with Bayesian Optimization-Informed Language Model Reasoning 2026 VLDB 4.9605343e-05
10,818 LakeHelm: Zero-Shot Lakehouse Advisor for Joint Engine-Format Selection and Configuration 2026 VLDB 4.9605343e-05
10,822 Toward Drift-Aware Database Benchmarking 2026 VLDB 4.9605343e-05
10,873 BaCon: Efficient Batch Processing of Counting Queries 2026 VLDB 4.9605343e-05
10,894 Revisiting Filtered ANN Benchmarks: A Hardness-Controlled Benchmark Generator for Realistic Evaluation 2026 VLDB 4.9605343e-05
10,903 ReSequel: Robust LLM-assisted Query Rewriting and Optimization using Templatization and Sampling 2026 VLDB 4.9605343e-05
10,913 The Data World Is Not Flat: Efficient Factorized Execution for Relational Systems 2026 VLDB 4.9605343e-05
10,953 QDBO: A Real-time Quantum-augmented Database System Optimizer 2026 VLDB 4.9605343e-05
10,954 FlowLog: Efficient and Extensible Datalog via Incrementality 2026 VLDB 4.9605343e-05
10,955 Storing and Indexing Multiple Tables by Interesting Orderings: For Efficient Joins, Groupings, and Updates in Relational Databases 2026 VLDB 4.9605343e-05
10,966 Benchmarking the Full Pipeline of Materialized-View-Based Query Rewriting 2026 VLDB 4.9605343e-05
10,981 Hermes at Scale: Powering Distributed Queries with a Unified Memory Fabric 2026 VLDB 4.9605343e-05
10,988 Evaluating the Practical Effectiveness of LLM-Driven Index Tuning on Microsoft SQL Server 2026 VLDB 4.9605343e-05
10,994 TATA: An Efficient Framework for Task Transfer in Query Plan Representation 2026 VLDB 4.9605343e-05
10,998 Real-time SQL Plan Management in Oracle 2026 VLDB 4.9605343e-05
11,008 Towards Industrial-Scale Parametric Query Optimization 2026 VLDB 4.9605343e-05
11,011 Ultron: History-Based Query Optimization at Databricks 2026 VLDB 4.9605343e-05
11,025 How Out-of-Bounds Are Your Cardinality Estimates? 2026 VLDB 4.9605343e-05
11,043 Demonstrating GenDB: Instance-Optimized and Customized Query Processing Code Generation via LLM Agents 2026 VLDB 4.9605343e-05
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Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 23 of 23 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 0.0023948467
91 On the Propagation of Errors in the Size of Join Results 1991 SIGMOD 0.00034691614
98 LEO - DB2's LEarning Optimizer 2001 VLDB 0.00034050614
103 Selectivity Estimation Without the Attribute Value Independence Assumption 1997 VLDB 0.00033847446
160 CORDS: Automatic Discovery of Correlations and Soft Functional Dependencies 2004 SIGMOD 0.00027775994
254 The History of Histograms (abridged) 2003 VLDB 0.00022999992
381 Preventing Bad Plans by Bounding the Impact of Cardinality Estimation Errors 2009 VLDB 0.00019497061
396 R* Optimizer Validation and Performance Evaluation for Local Queries 1986 SIGMOD 0.00019119719
568 Towards a Robust Query Optimizer: A Principled and Practical Approach 2005 SIGMOD 0.00016221103
881 Dynamic Programming Strikes Back 2008 SIGMOD 0.0001324243
1,061 Lightweight Graphical Models for Selectivity Estimation Without Independence Assumptions 2011 VLDB 0.00012207625
1,604 The Picasso Database Query Optimizer Visualizer 2010 VLDB 0.00010086711
1,896 CS2: A New Database Synopsis for Query Estimation 2013 SIGMOD 9.4010932e-05
1,935 Consistently Estimating the Selectivity of Conjuncts of Predicates 2005 VLDB 9.3407959e-05
1,987 Plan Bouquets: Query Processing without Selectivity Estimation 2014 SIGMOD 9.2323722e-05
2,248 Cache-Efficient Aggregation: Hashing Is Sorting 2015 SIGMOD 8.7484225e-05
2,261 Counter Strike: Generic Top-Down Join Enumeration for Hypergraphs 2013 VLDB 8.7351549e-05
2,527 Adaptive and Big Data Scale Parallel Execution in Oracle 2013 VLDB 8.3243069e-05
2,888 Query Optimizers: Time to Rethink the Contract? 2009 SIGMOD 7.8895201e-05
3,361 Exact Cardinality Query Optimization for Optimizer Testing 2009 VLDB 7.3621595e-05
3,807 Query Simplification: Graceful Degradation for Join-Order Optimization 2009 SIGMOD 6.9902343e-05
4,048 Of Snowstorms and Bushy Trees 2014 VLDB 6.817438e-05
6,816 ROX: Run-time Optimization of XQueries 2009 SIGMOD 5.6593309e-05
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