Scalable Querying of Nested Data

Summary: Compiles nested-collection programs into semantically equivalent shredded queries, avoiding costly manual rewrites or flattening. Combines compilation, compact nested representation, and automated skew handling to deliver scalable, balanced distributed execution. (summarized by gpt-5.6-luna on Jul 24 2026)

Paper ID: h81aebdac341de67d
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2021
Pagerank: 5.7823948e-05
Overall Rank: 6,440 | 56.72%
DOI: 10.14778/3430915.3430933
PDF: Download (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Jaclyn Smith (University of Oxford)
2. Michael Benedikt (University of Oxford)
3. Milos Nikolic (University of Edinburgh)
4. Amir Shaikhha (University of Edinburgh)

BibTeX Citation

@article{smith_vldb21,
        title = {{Scalable Querying of Nested Data}},
        author = {Smith, Jaclyn and Benedikt, Michael and Nikolic, Milos and Shaikhha, Amir},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '21},
        volume = {14},
        number = {3},
        pages = {445--457},
        doi = {10.14778/3430915.3430933},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/3430915.3430933},
        year = {2021}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 6 of 6 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
3,990	Beyond Relations: A Case for Elevating to the Entity-Relationship Abstraction	2025	CIDR	6.867063e-05
6,811	Instance-Optimal Acyclic Join Processing Without Regret: Engineering the Yannakakis Algorithm in Column Stores	2025	VLDB	5.6754603e-05
9,042	The Power of Nested Parallelism in Big Data Processing – Hitting Three Flies with One Slap –	2021	SIGMOD	5.2310219e-05
11,195	Rule-Based Graph Cleaning with GPUs on a Single Machine	2025	SIGMOD	4.9769913e-05
11,200	Nested Parquet Is Flat, Why Not Use It? How To Scan Nested Data With On-the-Fly Key Generation and Joins	2025	SIGMOD	4.9769913e-05
12,021	TraNCE: Transforming Nested Collections Efficiently	2021	VLDB	4.9769913e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 18 of 18 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
6	Pig Latin: A Not-So-Foreign Language for Data Processing	2008	SIGMOD	0.0010515896
23	Spark SQL: Relational Data Processing in Spark	2015	SIGMOD	0.00055384955
30	SCOPE: Easy and Efficient Parallel Processing of Massive Data Sets	2008	VLDB	0.00050475202
49	Dremel: Interactive Analysis of Web-Scale Datasets	2010	VLDB	0.0004314366
292	LINQ: Reconciling Objects, Relations and XML in the .NET Framework	2006	SIGMOD	0.00021937893
617	F1: A Distributed SQL Database That Scales	2013	VLDB	0.00015548752
747	Spanner: Becoming a SQL System	2017	SIGMOD	0.00014279621
2,753	Implicit Parallelism through Deep Language Embedding	2015	SIGMOD	8.0513412e-05
2,916	F1 Query: Declarative Querying at Scale	2018	VLDB	7.8581972e-05
3,214	Query Shredding: Efficient Relational Evaluation of Queries over Nested Multisets	2014	SIGMOD	7.5293834e-05
3,932	FERRY - Database-Supported Program Execution	2009	SIGMOD	6.9151928e-05
4,337	Algorithmic Aspects of Parallel Query Processing	2018	SIGMOD	6.6510297e-05
4,964	Avalanche-Safe LINQ Compilation	2010	VLDB	6.335593e-05
6,223	Incremental View Maintenance For Collection Programming	2016	PODS	5.8443814e-05
7,302	CleanM: An Optimizable Query Language for Unified Scale-Out Data Cleaning	2017	VLDB	5.5584215e-05
7,547	Storing and Querying Tree-Structured Records in Dremel	2014	VLDB	5.4962678e-05
9,841	PAXQuery: Parallel Analytical XML Processing	2015	SIGMOD	5.1215512e-05
9,842	Implementation and Analysis of a Parallel Collection Query Language	1996	VLDB	5.1215512e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	9,145	Equivalence of Nested Queries with Mixed Semantics	2009	PODS
2	6,050	Query Unnesting in Object-Oriented Databases	1998	SIGMOD
3	9,628	Parallelizing Query Optimization on Shared-Nothing Architectures	2016	VLDB
4	132	Optimization of Nested SQL Queries Revisited	1987	SIGMOD
5	11,200	Nested Parquet Is Flat, Why Not Use It? How To Scan Nested Data With On-the-Fly Key Generation and Joins	2025	SIGMOD
6	9,842	Implementation and Analysis of a Parallel Collection Query Language	1996	VLDB
7	978	Parallel Evaluation of Conjunctive Queries	2011	PODS
8	2,156	A Recursive Algebra and Query Optimization for Nested Relations	1989	SIGMOD
9	13,023	A Nested Relational Approach to Processing SQL Subqueries	2005	SIGMOD
10	3,214	Query Shredding: Efficient Relational Evaluation of Queries over Nested Multisets	2014	SIGMOD