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The History of Histograms (abridged)

Summary: A deliberately compressed, personally biased history of histograms, spanning scientific origins, approximation/compression, industrial adoption, and database problems. Treats the historical narrative itself as a histogram, preserving high-interest events under a fixed space budget and evaluating semantic fidelity. (summarized by gpt-5.6-luna on Jul 24 2026)

Paper ID
h6cdc112dd76a9bd6
Venue
VLDB
Year
2003
Pagerank
0.00022999992
Overall Rank
254 | 98.30%
DOI
10.1016/B978-012722442-8/50011-2

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

BibTeX Citation

@article{ioannidis_vldb03,
        title = {{The History of Histograms (abridged)}},
        author = {Ioannidis, Yannis},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '03},
        doi = {10.1016/B978-012722442-8/50011-2},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-012722442-8/50011-2},
        year = {2003}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 2 of 52 citing papers.

Rank Citing Paper Year Venue Pagerank
12,598 Statistics Collection in Oracle Spatial and Graph: Fast Histogram Construction for Complex Geometry Objects 2013 VLDB 4.9605343e-05
12,841 Filtered Statistics 2009 SIGMOD 4.9605343e-05
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Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 50 of 55 cited papers.

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

Rank Cited Paper Year Venue Pagerank
9 Online Aggregation 1997 SIGMOD 0.00076079812
36 Accurate Estimation Of The Number Of Tuples Satisfying A Condition 1984 SIGMOD 0.00047770864
37 Improved Histograms for Selectivity Estimation of Range Predicates 1996 SIGMOD 0.00047654188
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
119 Equi-Depth Histograms For Estimating Selectivity Factors For Multi-Dimensional Queries 1988 SIGMOD 0.00031291457
124 Approximate Frequency Counts over Data Streams 2002 VLDB 0.00030503973
135 Ripple Joins for Online Aggregation 1999 SIGMOD 0.00029805026
138 Join Synopses for Approximate Query Answering 1999 SIGMOD 0.00029532435
171 Wavelet-Based Histograms for Selectivity Estimation 1998 SIGMOD 0.00027063233
222 Approximate Computation of Multidimensional Aggregates of Sparse Data Using Wavelets 1999 SIGMOD 0.00024136952
234 Adaptive Selectivity Estimation Using Query Feedback 1994 SIGMOD 0.00023726296
242 Fast Incremental Maintenance of Approximate Histograms 1997 VLDB 0.00023327437
252 Approximate Medians and other Quantiles in One Pass and with Limited Memory 1998 SIGMOD 0.00023058622
277 Optimal Histograms with Quality Guarantees 1998 VLDB 0.0002235043
285 Balancing Histogram Optimality and Practicality for Query Result Size Estimation 1995 SIGMOD 0.00022143946
287 Selectivity Estimation using Probabilistic Models 2001 SIGMOD 0.00022060616
311 Approximate Query Processing Using Wavelets 2000 VLDB 0.00021315058
316 Surfing Wavelets on Streams: One-Pass Summaries for Approximate Aggregate Queries 2001 VLDB 0.00021238056
350 The Query By Image Content (QBIC) System 1995 SIGMOD 0.0002018411
372 STHoles: A Multidimensional Workload-Aware Histogram 2001 SIGMOD 0.00019768921
442 Random Sampling Techniques for Space Efficient Online Computation of Order Statistics of Large Datasets 1999 SIGMOD 0.00018182341
450 Histogram-Based Approximation of Set-Valued Query Answers 1999 VLDB 0.0001806593
457 Self-tuning Histograms: Building Histograms Without Looking at Data 1999 SIGMOD 0.00017915659
518 Random Sampling for Histogram Construction: How much is enough? 1998 SIGMOD 0.00016918797
646 Exploiting Statistics on Query Expressions for Optimization 2002 SIGMOD 0.00015166402
701 Independence is Good: Dependency-Based Histogram Synopses for High-Dimensional Data 2001 SIGMOD 0.0001464136
745 Dynamic Multidimensional Histograms 2002 SIGMOD 0.00014267268
785 A One-Pass Algorithm for Accurately Estimating Quantiles for Disk-Resident Data 1997 VLDB 0.0001399349
806 Universality of Serial Histograms 1993 VLDB 0.00013752086
861 How to Summarize the Universe: Dynamic Maintenance of Quantiles 2002 VLDB 0.00013374869
868 Approximating Multi-Dimensional Aggregate Range Queries Over Real Attributes 2000 SIGMOD 0.00013336675
919 Estimating the Selectivity of XML Path Expressions for Internet Scale Applications 2001 VLDB 0.00013042589
1,006 Dynamic Maintenance of Wavelet-Based Histograms 2000 VLDB 0.00012551491
1,080 Multi-dimensional Selectivity Estimation Using Compressed Histogram Information 1999 SIGMOD 0.00012114187
1,164 Estimating Alphanumeric Selectivity in the Presence of Wildcards 1996 SIGMOD 0.0001170903
1,174 Wavelet Synopses with Error Guarantees 2002 SIGMOD 0.0001165008
1,187 An Instant and Accurate Size Estimation Method for Joins and Selection in a Retrieval-Intensive Environment 1993 SIGMOD 0.00011580993
1,466 Substring Selectivity Estimation 1999 PODS 0.00010546176
1,693 Global Optimization of Histograms 2001 SIGMOD 9.8377504e-05
1,754 Combining Histograms and Parametric Curve Fitting for Feedback-Driven Query Result-Size Estimation 1999 VLDB 9.7111856e-05
1,832 A Scalable Hash Ripple Join Algorithm 2002 SIGMOD 9.5365548e-05
1,969 StatiX: Making XML Count 2002 SIGMOD 9.2805411e-05
2,176 Selectivity Estimation in Spatial Databases 1999 SIGMOD 8.9031141e-05
2,193 Probabilistic Optimization of Top N Queries 1999 VLDB 8.8828694e-05
2,378 Statistical Synopses for Graph-Structured XML Databases 2002 SIGMOD 8.5315761e-05
2,838 Estimating the Selectivity of Spatial Queries Using the 'Correlation' Fractal Dimension 1995 VLDB 7.9401525e-05
3,195 Structure and Value Synopses for XML Data Graphs 2002 VLDB 7.530952e-05
3,281 Multi-Dimensional Substring Selectivity Estimation 1999 VLDB 7.4493372e-05
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# Overall Rank Paper Year Venue
1 242 Fast Incremental Maintenance of Approximate Histograms 1997 VLDB
2 1,693 Global Optimization of Histograms 2001 SIGMOD
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5 11,989 Data-Independent Space Partitionings for Summaries 2021 PODS
6 6,653 Approximating and Testing k-Histogram Distributions in Sub-linear Time 2012 PODS
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10 745 Dynamic Multidimensional Histograms 2002 SIGMOD