Processing a Trillion Cells per Mouse Click

Summary: PowerDrill combines columnar storage, composite range partitioning, and memory-efficient, heavily engineered structures for interactive ad hoc analytics. Its 10–100× speedups enable a Web UI click to process up to a trillion cells, complementing distributed systems such as Dremel. (summarized by gpt-5.6-luna on Jul 24 2026)

Paper ID: h835a19cf2823d8bd
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2012
Pagerank: 0.00011527605
Overall Rank: 1,210 | 91.87%
DOI: 10.14778/2350229.2350259

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Alexander Hall (Google)
2. Olaf Bachmann (Google)
3. Robert Büssow (Google)
4. Silviu Gănceanu (Google)
5. Marc Nunkesser (Google)

BibTeX Citation

@article{hall_vldb12,
        title = {{Processing a Trillion Cells per Mouse Click}},
        author = {Hall, Alexander and Bachmann, Olaf and Büssow, Robert and Gănceanu, Silviu and Nunkesser, Marc},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '12},
        volume = {5},
        number = {11},
        pages = {1436--1447},
        doi = {10.14778/2350229.2350259},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/2350229.2350259},
        year = {2012}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 22 of 22 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
432	Shark: SQL and Rich Analytics at Scale	2013	SIGMOD	0.00018339357
1,036	Fine-grained Partitioning for Aggressive Data Skipping	2014	SIGMOD	0.00012377471
1,135	Dremel: A Decade of Interactive SQL Analysis at Web Scale	2020	VLDB	0.00011891907
1,236	Druid: A Real-time Analytical Data Store	2014	SIGMOD	0.00011402848
1,381	Scuba: Diving into Data at Facebook	2013	VLDB	0.00010860462
1,423	Procella: Unifying serving and analytical data at YouTube	2019	VLDB	0.00010719956
2,915	F1 Query: Declarative Querying at Scale	2018	VLDB	7.8616593e-05
3,081	Skipping-oriented Partitioning for Columnar Layouts	2017	VLDB	7.6653727e-05
4,172	Pinot: Realtime OLAP for 530 Million Users	2018	SIGMOD	6.7598973e-05
4,530	BigLake: BigQuery’s Evolution toward a Multi-Cloud Lakehouse	2024	SIGMOD	6.5588866e-05
4,756	Cuckoo Index: A Lightweight Secondary Index Structure	2020	VLDB	6.43221e-05
5,127	Fast Database Restarts at Facebook	2014	SIGMOD	6.2608485e-05
5,516	Randomized Error Removal for Online Spread Estimation in Data Streaming	2021	VLDB	6.0970248e-05
5,745	Scalable Progressive Analytics on Big Data in the Cloud	2013	VLDB	6.0090513e-05
5,930	Hillview: A trillion-cell spreadsheet for big data	2019	VLDB	5.9438354e-05
7,245	Pruning in Snowflake: Working Smarter, Not Harder	2025	SIGMOD	5.5761132e-05
7,328	Stat! - An Interactive Analytics Environment for Big Data	2013	SIGMOD	5.5508575e-05
8,281	Cubrick: Indexing Millions of Records per Second for Interactive Analytics	2016	VLDB	5.3633335e-05
8,324	Cohort Query Processing	2017	VLDB	5.3542169e-05
10,886	Accelerating String-Heavy Queries with LLM Token Tables	2026	VLDB	4.9793485e-05
11,591	Enhancing Accuracy for Super Spreader Identification in High-Speed Data Streams	2024	VLDB	4.9793485e-05
12,482	A Partitioning Framework for Aggressive Data Skipping	2014	VLDB	4.9793485e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 14 of 14 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
14	MonetDB/X100: Hyper-Pipelining Query Execution	2005	CIDR	0.00064031282
49	Dremel: Interactive Analysis of Web-Scale Datasets	2010	VLDB	0.00043160717
61	Integrating Compression and Execution in Column-Oriented Database Systems	2006	SIGMOD	0.000392237
216	Small Materialized Aggregates: A Light Weight Index Structure for Data Warehousing	1998	VLDB	0.00024485024
331	Column-Stores vs. Row-Stores: How Different Are They Really?	2008	SIGMOD	0.0002077683
549	Non First Normal Form Relations To Represent Hierarchically Organized Data	1984	PODS	0.00016563595
593	2Q: A Low Overhead High Performance Buffer Management Replacement Algorithm	1994	VLDB	0.00015836342
1,327	Column-oriented Database Systems	2009	VLDB	0.00011003776
1,694	Self-organizing Tuple Reconstruction in Column-stores	2009	SIGMOD	9.8562172e-05
1,863	The Researcher's Guide to the Data Deluge: Querying a Scientific Database in Just a Few Seconds	2011	VLDB	9.4846052e-05
2,155	Brighthouse: An Analytic Data Warehouse for Ad-hoc Queries	2008	VLDB	8.9456729e-05
3,115	The CompleteSearch Engine: Interactive, Efficient, and Towards IR & DB Integration	2007	CIDR	7.6338594e-05
3,987	Compressing Large Boolean Matrices Using Reordering Techniques	2004	VLDB	6.8721548e-05

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1	5,827	Design and Evaluation of Storage Organizations for Read-Optimized Main Memory Databases	2013	VLDB
2	976	A Common Database Approach for OLTP and OLAP Using an In-Memory Column Database	2009	SIGMOD
3	12,070	Workload-Aware Column Imprints	2020	SIGMOD
4	3,204	Columnar Storage and List-based Processing for Graph Database Management Systems	2021	VLDB
5	12	C-Store: A Column-oriented DBMS	2005	VLDB
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7	331	Column-Stores vs. Row-Stores: How Different Are They Really?	2008	SIGMOD
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