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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
8.9344773e-05
Overall Rank
2,162 | 85.48%
DOI
10.14778/3297753.3297761
PDF
Download (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

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
2,600 Complaint-driven Training Data Debugging for Query 2.0 2020 SIGMOD 8.2346824e-05
4,984 XInsight: eXplainable Data Analysis Through The Lens of Causality 2023 SIGMOD 6.325863e-05
5,251 Enabling SQL-based Training Data Debugging for Federated Learning 2022 VLDB 6.2092359e-05
5,533 Putting Things into Context: Rich Explanations for Query Answers using Join Graphs 2021 SIGMOD 6.0906707e-05
5,555 Sommelier: Curating DNN Models for the Masses 2022 SIGMOD 6.0829894e-05
7,010 Video-zilla: An Indexing Layer for Large-Scale Video Analytics 2022 SIGMOD 5.6195953e-05
7,030 Explaining Inference Queries with Bayesian Optimization 2021 VLDB 5.6150695e-05
7,709 Interactive Query Explanations Using Fine Grained Provenance 2022 SIGMOD 5.4719078e-05
8,408 FaDE: More Than a Million What-ifs Per Second 2025 VLDB 5.3364407e-05
9,027 Complaint-Driven Training Data Debugging at Interactive Speeds 2022 SIGMOD 5.2340097e-05
9,054 TabEE: Tabular Embeddings Explanations 2024 SIGMOD 5.2287012e-05
9,891 TSExplain: Surfacing Evolving Explanations for Time Series 2021 SIGMOD 5.1145101e-05
10,191 Reptile: Aggregation-level Explanations for Hierarchical Data 2022 SIGMOD 5.0628015e-05
10,192 COMPARE: Accelerating Groupwise Comparison in Relational Databases for Data Analytics 2021 VLDB 5.0628015e-05
10,749 Database Views as Explanations for Relational Deep Learning 2026 VLDB 4.9769913e-05
11,456 SDEcho: Efficient Explanation of Aggregated Sequence Difference 2025 VLDB 4.9769913e-05
11,896 BABOONS: Black-Box Optimization of Data Summaries in Natural Language 2022 VLDB 4.9769913e-05
11,904 Automated Relational Data Explanation using External Semantic Knowledge 2022 VLDB 4.9769913e-05
12,131 Leveraging Organizational Resources to Adapt Models to New Data Modalities 2020 VLDB 4.9769913e-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 0.0006897844
23 Spark SQL: Relational Data Processing in Spark 2015 SIGMOD 0.00055384955
29 Fast Algorithms for Mining Association Rules 1994 VLDB 0.00051189413
49 Dremel: Interactive Analysis of Web-Scale Datasets 2010 VLDB 0.0004314366
53 Eddies: Continuously Adaptive Query Processing 2000 SIGMOD 0.000408505
91 On the Propagation of Errors in the Size of Join Results 1991 SIGMOD 0.00034748721
107 Improved Query Performance with Variant Indexes 1997 SIGMOD 0.00033459417
160 CORDS: Automatic Discovery of Correlations and Soft Functional Dependencies 2004 SIGMOD 0.00027827605
178 The Vertica Analytic Database: C-Store 7 Years Later 2012 VLDB 0.00026620521
190 Scorpion: Explaining Away Outliers in Aggregate Queries 2013 VLDB 0.0002582857
272 An Overview of Query Optimization in Relational Systems 1998 PODS 0.0002251422
315 Worst-Case Optimal Join Algorithms: Techniques, Results, and Open Problems 2018 PODS 0.00021236408
327 Impala: A Modern, Open-Source SQL Engine for Hadoop 2015 CIDR 0.00020942751
671 A Formal Approach to Finding Explanations for Database Queries 2014 SIGMOD 0.00014948069
731 Learning Generalized Linear Models Over Normalized Data 2015 SIGMOD 0.00014400356
779 To Join or Not to Join? Thinking Twice about Joins before Feature Selection 2016 SIGMOD 0.00014048128
783 DBSherlock: A Performance Diagnostic Tool for Transactional Databases 2016 SIGMOD 0.0001401708
837 Proactive Re-Optimization 2005 SIGMOD 0.00013551072
1,185 Adaptive Optimization of Very Large Join Queries 2018 SIGMOD 0.00011607329
1,238 Druid: A Real-time Analytical Data Store 2014 SIGMOD 0.00011397949
1,257 Towards Linear Algebra over Normalized Data 2017 VLDB 0.0001130959
1,267 An Experimental Comparison of Thirteen Relational Equi-Joins in Main Memory 2016 SIGMOD 0.00011265987
1,708 PerfXplain: Debugging MapReduce Job Performance 2012 VLDB 9.8184303e-05
1,833 MacroBase: Prioritizing Attention in Fast Data 2017 SIGMOD 9.5376219e-05
1,983 Causality and Explanations in Databases 2014 VLDB 9.2548712e-05
2,687 Data X-Ray: A Diagnostic Tool for Data Errors 2015 SIGMOD 8.1271333e-05
3,661 Scalable Computation of Acyclic Joins (Extended Abstract) 2006 PODS 7.1184935e-05
4,363 Multi-Structural Databases 2005 PODS 6.6354952e-05
6,581 Efficient Implementation of Large-Scale Multi-Structural Databases 2005 VLDB 5.7421175e-05
7,542 Feature Selection in Enterprise Analytics: A Demonstration using an R-based Data Analytics System 2013 VLDB 5.4976824e-05
12,266 Prioritizing Attention in Fast Data: Principles and Promise 2017 CIDR 4.9769913e-05
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