Access Path Selection in a Relational Database Management System

Summary: Access path selection for a single relation and for joins from a boolean predicate specification. System R, an IBM experimental DBMS, demonstrates automatic physical path choice to support SQL-like queries and research on the relational model. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: h49868142d9c2ae1f
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 1979
Pagerank: 0.0023948467
Overall Rank: 1 | 100.00%
DOI: 10.1145/582095.582099

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. P. Griffiths Selinger (IBM)
2. M. M. Astrahan (IBM)
3. D. D. Chamberlin (IBM)
4. R. A. Lorie (IBM)
5. T. G. Price (IBM)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{selinger_sigmod79,
        title = {{Access Path Selection in a Relational Database Management System}},
        author = {Selinger, P. Griffiths and Astrahan, M. M. and Chamberlin, D. D. and Lorie, R. A. and Price, T. G.},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '79},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/582095.582099},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/582095.582099},
        year = {1979}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 50 of 455 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
2,132	Reusing Invariants: A New Strategy for Correlated Queries	1998	SIGMOD	8.9837489e-05
2,151	Optimization of Multi-Way Join Queries for Parallel Execution	1991	VLDB	8.9483042e-05
2,161	Theory of Database Queries (Extended Abstract)	1988	PODS	8.9203568e-05
2,176	Selectivity Estimation in Spatial Databases	1999	SIGMOD	8.9031141e-05
2,182	Optimization Algorithms for Exploiting the Parallelism-Communication Tradeoff in Pipelined Parallelism	1994	VLDB	8.9007338e-05
2,194	Two Can Keep a Secret: A Distributed Architecture for Secure Database Services	2005	CIDR	8.8822913e-05
2,225	ThalamusDB: Approximate Query Processing on Multi-Modal Data	2024	SIGMOD	8.7996555e-05
2,228	Estimating Join Selectivities using Bandwidth-Optimized Kernel Density Models	2017	VLDB	8.7912743e-05
2,237	Shared Workload Optimization	2014	VLDB	8.7777395e-05
2,240	Spinning Fast Iterative Data Flows	2012	VLDB	8.7716808e-05
2,241	Physical Data Independence, Constraints, and Optimization with Universal Plans	1999	VLDB	8.7710222e-05
2,280	Parallel evaluation of multi-join queries	1995	SIGMOD	8.6972041e-05
2,297	Join Queries with External Text Sources: Execution and Optimization Techniques	1995	SIGMOD	8.6659442e-05
2,309	Multi-dimensional Resource Scheduling for Parallel Queries	1996	SIGMOD	8.6508672e-05
2,317	Query Flocks: A Generalization of Association-Rule Mining	1998	SIGMOD	8.6398664e-05
2,320	Optimization of Nested Queries in a Distributed Relational Database	1984	VLDB	8.6359247e-05
2,351	Extending the Search Strategy in a Query Optimizer	1991	VLDB	8.5799847e-05
2,381	To Tune or not to Tune? A Lightweight Physical Design Alerter	2006	VLDB	8.5299827e-05
2,397	Performance Tradeoffs for Client-Server Query Processing	1996	SIGMOD	8.5108976e-05
2,521	Optimization of Queries with User-defined Predicates	1996	VLDB	8.3339593e-05
2,531	Multi-Objective Parametric Query Optimization	2015	VLDB	8.3140235e-05
2,548	A Predicate Matching Algorithm for Database Rule Systems	1990	SIGMOD	8.2927647e-05
2,557	An Architecture For Query Optimization	1982	SIGMOD	8.278395e-05
2,577	Plan-based Complex Event Detection across Distributed Sources	2008	VLDB	8.2538023e-05
2,614	Statistical Learning Techniques for Costing XML Queries	2005	VLDB	8.2023561e-05
2,622	The MemSQL Query Optimizer: A modern optimizer for real-time analytics in a distributed database	2016	VLDB	8.1976067e-05
2,626	Cost-Based Optimization of Decision Support Queries using Transient-Views	1998	SIGMOD	8.1919956e-05
2,629	Process And Dataflow Control In Distributed Data-Intensive Systems	1988	SIGMOD	8.1855949e-05
2,630	On the Effectiveness of Optimization Search Strategies for Parallel Execution Spaces	1993	VLDB	8.1828876e-05
2,634	WideTable: An Accelerator for Analytical Data Processing	2014	VLDB	8.1797149e-05
2,696	Cost-based or Learning-based? A Hybrid Query Optimizer for Query Plan Selection	2022	VLDB	8.1068354e-05
2,700	Major Technical Advancements in Apache Hive	2014	SIGMOD	8.096888e-05
2,701	On Improving User Response Times in Tableau	2015	SIGMOD	8.0959949e-05
2,715	An Integrated Approach to Recovery and High Availability in an Updatable, Distributed Data Warehouse	2006	VLDB	8.0838677e-05
2,756	Holistic Twig Joins on Indexed XML Documents	2003	VLDB	8.0322898e-05
2,808	GPL: A GPU-based Pipelined Query Processing Engine	2016	SIGMOD	7.962315e-05
2,852	FactorJoin: A New Cardinality Estimation Framework for Join Queries	2023	SIGMOD	7.9201312e-05
2,888	Query Optimizers: Time to Rethink the Contract?	2009	SIGMOD	7.8895201e-05
2,915	A New Way to Compute the Product and Join of Relations	1980	SIGMOD	7.8546016e-05
2,924	Abacus: A Cost-Based Optimizer for Semantic Operator Systems	2026	VLDB	7.8407467e-05
2,993	Parallel Query Scheduling and Optimization with Time- and Space-Shared Resources	1997	VLDB	7.7579154e-05
2,994	Optimizing Boolean Expressions in Object Bases	1992	VLDB	7.756091e-05
3,007	The Value of Merge-Join and Hash-Join in SQL Server	1999	VLDB	7.7452155e-05
3,009	Multiple Join Size Estimation by Virtual Domains (extended abstract)	1993	PODS	7.7439468e-05
3,021	Query Processing Strategies in the PASCAL/R Relational Database Management System	1982	SIGMOD	7.7265285e-05
3,144	Solving the Join Ordering Problem via Mixed Integer Linear Programming	2017	SIGMOD	7.5846375e-05
3,153	Evita Raced: Metacompilation for Declarative Networks	2008	VLDB	7.5712705e-05
3,156	Query Optimization Techniques for Partitioned Tables	2011	SIGMOD	7.5694347e-05
3,212	Efficiently Approximating Selectivity Functions using Low Overhead Regression Models	2020	VLDB	7.5145409e-05
3,218	Implementing an Interpreter for Functional Rules in a Query Optimizer	1988	VLDB	7.5096666e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 0 of 0 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	609	An Authorization Mechanism for a Relational Data Base System	1976	SIGMOD
2	1,501	Advanced Query Processing in Object Bases Using Access Support Relations	1990	VLDB
3	13,599	An Implementation of a Query Language Supporting Path Expressions	1982	SIGMOD
4	7,156	An Access Path Model for Physical Database Design	1980	SIGMOD
5	2,345	Access Support in Object Bases	1990	SIGMOD
6	13,617	Nonprocedural Query Processing For Databases With Access Paths	1978	SIGMOD
7	185	On Extending the Functions of a Relational Database System	1982	SIGMOD
8	326	Evaluation of Database Access Paths	1978	SIGMOD
9	3,021	Query Processing Strategies in the PASCAL/R Relational Database Management System	1982	SIGMOD
10	1,992	A Generalized Access Path Model And Its Application To A Relational Data Base System	1976	SIGMOD