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DIFF: A Relational Interface for Large-Scale Data Explanation

Summary: DIFF introduces a relational aggregation operator that unifies explanation engines with declarative SQL for large-scale analytics. Implemented in MB SQL (MacroBase), with single-node and distributed deployments, it preserves semantics, enables optimizations, and yields up to 10x speedups in production. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID
h7638f3794105ad65
Venue
VLDB
Year
2019
Pagerank
8.9364035e-05
Overall Rank
2,160 | 85.48%
DOI
10.14778/3297753.3297761

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

BibTeX Citation

@article{abuzaid_vldb19,
        title = {{DIFF: A Relational Interface for Large-Scale Data Explanation}},
        author = {Abuzaid, Firas and Kraft, Peter and Suri, Sahaana and Gan, Edward and Xu, Eric and Shenoy, Atul and Ananthanarayan, Asvin and Sheu, John and Meijer, Erik and Wu, Xi and Naughton, Jeff and Bailis, Peter and Zaharia, Matei},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '19},
        volume = {12},
        number = {4},
        pages = {419--432},
        doi = {10.14778/3297753.3297761},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/3297753.3297761},
        year = {2019}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 19 of 19 citing papers.

Rank Citing Paper Year Venue Pagerank
2,598 Complaint-driven Training Data Debugging for Query 2.0 2020 SIGMOD 8.2385793e-05
4,982 XInsight: eXplainable Data Analysis Through The Lens of Causality 2023 SIGMOD 6.328859e-05
5,247 Enabling SQL-based Training Data Debugging for Federated Learning 2022 VLDB 6.2121767e-05
5,529 Putting Things into Context: Rich Explanations for Query Answers using Join Graphs 2021 SIGMOD 6.0935553e-05
5,553 Sommelier: Curating DNN Models for the Masses 2022 SIGMOD 6.0858703e-05
7,009 Video-zilla: An Indexing Layer for Large-Scale Video Analytics 2022 SIGMOD 5.6222568e-05
7,028 Explaining Inference Queries with Bayesian Optimization 2021 VLDB 5.6177289e-05
7,703 Interactive Query Explanations Using Fine Grained Provenance 2022 SIGMOD 5.4744994e-05
8,892 FaDE: More Than a Million What-ifs Per Second 2025 VLDB 5.2559789e-05
9,019 Complaint-Driven Training Data Debugging at Interactive Speeds 2022 SIGMOD 5.2364886e-05
9,046 TabEE: Tabular Embeddings Explanations 2024 SIGMOD 5.2311776e-05
9,884 TSExplain: Surfacing Evolving Explanations for Time Series 2021 SIGMOD 5.1169323e-05
10,188 Reptile: Aggregation-level Explanations for Hierarchical Data 2022 SIGMOD 5.0651993e-05
10,189 COMPARE: Accelerating Groupwise Comparison in Relational Databases for Data Analytics 2021 VLDB 5.0651993e-05
10,739 Database Views as Explanations for Relational Deep Learning 2026 VLDB 4.9793485e-05
11,450 SDEcho: Efficient Explanation of Aggregated Sequence Difference 2025 VLDB 4.9793485e-05
11,890 BABOONS: Black-Box Optimization of Data Summaries in Natural Language 2022 VLDB 4.9793485e-05
11,898 Automated Relational Data Explanation using External Semantic Knowledge 2022 VLDB 4.9793485e-05
12,125 Leveraging Organizational Resources to Adapt Models to New Data Modalities 2020 VLDB 4.9793485e-05
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Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 31 of 31 cited papers.

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

Rank Cited Paper Year Venue Pagerank
12 C-Store: A Column-oriented DBMS 2005 VLDB 0.00068998927
23 Spark SQL: Relational Data Processing in Spark 2015 SIGMOD 0.00055406774
29 Fast Algorithms for Mining Association Rules 1994 VLDB 0.0005121339
49 Dremel: Interactive Analysis of Web-Scale Datasets 2010 VLDB 0.00043160717
53 Eddies: Continuously Adaptive Query Processing 2000 SIGMOD 0.00040860054
91 On the Propagation of Errors in the Size of Join Results 1991 SIGMOD 0.0003475226
107 Improved Query Performance with Variant Indexes 1997 SIGMOD 0.00033460288
160 CORDS: Automatic Discovery of Correlations and Soft Functional Dependencies 2004 SIGMOD 0.00027837289
179 The Vertica Analytic Database: C-Store 7 Years Later 2012 VLDB 0.00026611886
189 Scorpion: Explaining Away Outliers in Aggregate Queries 2013 VLDB 0.00025840026
272 An Overview of Query Optimization in Relational Systems 1998 PODS 0.00022509573
315 Worst-Case Optimal Join Algorithms: Techniques, Results, and Open Problems 2018 PODS 0.00021246
327 Impala: A Modern, Open-Source SQL Engine for Hadoop 2015 CIDR 0.0002095191
670 A Formal Approach to Finding Explanations for Database Queries 2014 SIGMOD 0.00014954494
730 Learning Generalized Linear Models Over Normalized Data 2015 SIGMOD 0.00014406936
777 To Join or Not to Join? Thinking Twice about Joins before Feature Selection 2016 SIGMOD 0.00014054709
782 DBSherlock: A Performance Diagnostic Tool for Transactional Databases 2016 SIGMOD 0.00014022168
836 Proactive Re-Optimization 2005 SIGMOD 0.00013557047
1,186 Adaptive Optimization of Very Large Join Queries 2018 SIGMOD 0.0001160797
1,236 Druid: A Real-time Analytical Data Store 2014 SIGMOD 0.00011402848
1,256 Towards Linear Algebra over Normalized Data 2017 VLDB 0.00011314687
1,266 An Experimental Comparison of Thirteen Relational Equi-Joins in Main Memory 2016 SIGMOD 0.00011269175
1,708 PerfXplain: Debugging MapReduce Job Performance 2012 VLDB 9.8224587e-05
1,833 MacroBase: Prioritizing Attention in Fast Data 2017 SIGMOD 9.5405247e-05
1,981 Causality and Explanations in Databases 2014 VLDB 9.2586863e-05
2,686 Data X-Ray: A Diagnostic Tool for Data Errors 2015 SIGMOD 8.1308928e-05
3,660 Scalable Computation of Acyclic Joins (Extended Abstract) 2006 PODS 7.1218018e-05
4,361 Multi-Structural Databases 2005 PODS 6.6385952e-05
6,577 Efficient Implementation of Large-Scale Multi-Structural Databases 2005 VLDB 5.7447944e-05
7,536 Feature Selection in Enterprise Analytics: A Demonstration using an R-based Data Analytics System 2013 VLDB 5.5002435e-05
12,260 Prioritizing Attention in Fast Data: Principles and Promise 2017 CIDR 4.9793485e-05
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