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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 33 of 333 citing papers.

Rank Citing Paper Year Venue Pagerank
11,052 A Portable Middleware for Plan-Based Adaptive Query Processing 2026 VLDB 4.9605343e-05
11,216 Demo of LearnedWMP: Workload Memory Prediction Using Deep Query Template Representations 2025 SIGMOD 4.9605343e-05
11,236 UDFBench: A Tool for Benchmarking UDF Queries on SQL Engines 2025 SIGMOD 4.9605343e-05
11,238 Virtualizing Cloud Data Infrastructures with BRAD 2025 SIGMOD 4.9605343e-05
11,243 AJOSC: Adaptive Join Order Selection for Continuous Queries 2025 SIGMOD 4.9605343e-05
11,303 Holistic query Approximation via RL Modeling 2025 VLDB 4.9605343e-05
11,306 QOVIS: Understanding and Diagnosing Query Optimizer via a Visualization-assisted Approach 2025 VLDB 4.9605343e-05
11,321 ACE: A Cardinality Estimator for Set-Valued Queries 2025 VLDB 4.9605343e-05
11,322 Accio: Bolt-on Query Federation 2025 VLDB 4.9605343e-05
11,340 Unraveling the Impact of Window Semantics: Optimizing Join Order for Efficient Stream Processing 2025 VLDB 4.9605343e-05
11,347 Robust Plan Evaluation based on Approximate Probabilistic Machine Learning 2025 VLDB 4.9605343e-05
11,350 AQETuner: Reliable Query-level Configuration Tuning for Analytical Query Engines 2025 VLDB 4.9605343e-05
11,394 The Accuracy of Cardinality Estimators: Unraveling the Evaluation Result Conundrum 2025 VLDB 4.9605343e-05
11,414 Privacy-Enhanced Database Synthesis for Benchmark Publishing 2025 VLDB 4.9605343e-05
11,443 SQL:Trek Automated Index Design at Airbnb 2025 VLDB 4.9605343e-05
11,458 Hint-QPT: Hints for Robust Query Performance Tuning 2025 VLDB 4.9605343e-05
11,480 A Demonstration of Q^2O: Quantum-augmented Query Optimizer 2025 VLDB 4.9605343e-05
11,484 Learned Cost Models for Query Optimization: From Batch to Streaming Systems 2025 VLDB 4.9605343e-05
11,501 LEAP: A Low-cost Spark SQL Query Optimizer using Pairwise Comparison 2025 VLDB 4.9605343e-05
11,505 LASER: Buffer-Aware Learned Query Scheduling in Master-Standby Databases 2025 VLDB 4.9605343e-05
11,511 RankPQO: Learning-to-Rank for Parametric Query Optimization 2025 VLDB 4.9605343e-05
11,564 Sub-optimal Join Order Identification with L1-error 2024 SIGMOD 4.9605343e-05
11,593 A Universal Sketch for Estimating Heavy Hitters and Per-Element Frequency Moments in Data Streams with Bounded Deletions 2024 SIGMOD 4.9605343e-05
11,597 High-Performance Query Processing with NVMe Arrays: Spilling without Killing Performance 2024 SIGMOD 4.9605343e-05
11,600 SPID-Join: A Skew-resistant Processing-in-DIMM Join Algorithm Exploiting the Bank- and Rank-level Parallelisms of DIMMs 2024 SIGMOD 4.9605343e-05
11,601 Towards a Converged Relational-Graph Optimization Framework 2024 SIGMOD 4.9605343e-05
11,777 SH2O: Efficient Data Access for Work-Sharing Databases 2023 SIGMOD 4.9605343e-05
11,815 Asymptotically Better Query Optimization Using Indexed Algebra 2023 VLDB 4.9605343e-05
11,907 DeepO: A Learned Query Optimizer 2022 SIGMOD 4.9605343e-05
11,954 AutoDI: Towards an Automatic Plan Regression Analysis 2022 VLDB 4.9605343e-05
12,081 Fangorn: Adaptive Execution Framework for Heterogeneous Workloads on Shared Clusters 2021 VLDB 4.9605343e-05
12,196 Recommending Deployment Strategies in Crowdsourcing Platforms 2019 SIGMOD 4.9605343e-05
12,251 Tighter Upper Bounds for Join Cardinality Estimates 2018 SIGMOD 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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