Qualitative Join Discovery in Data Lakes using Examples

Summary: QbE join discovery for schema/metadata-poor data lakes: SemDisc finds hybrid join paths mixing equi- and semantic joins from a few example values. Key novelty is supporting intermediate non-overlapping tables while guaranteeing example containment, with index-backed path search and >3x precision gains. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Apr 11 2026)

Paper ID: h969b58c82ef59bb7
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2026
Pagerank: 4.9605343e-05
Overall Rank: 10,745 | 27.98%
DOI: 10.1145/3786682
PDF: Download (CC BY 4.0)

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

No non-self incoming citations found for this paper in this database.

Authors

1. Mir Mahathir Mohammad (University of Utah)
2. El Kindi Rezig (University of Utah)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{mohammad_sigmod26,
        title = {{Qualitative Join Discovery in Data Lakes using Examples}},
        author = {Mohammad, Mir Mahathir and Rezig, El Kindi},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '26},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/3786682},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3786682},
        year = {2026}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 1 of 1 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
11,086	Lory-j: Location-aware Join Discovery from Data Lakes	2026	VLDB	4.9605343e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 38 of 38 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
84	Learned Cardinalities: Estimating Correlated Joins with Deep Learning	2019	CIDR	0.00035920657
132	Deep Entity Matching with Pre-Trained Language Models	2021	VLDB	0.00030213215
138	Join Synopses for Approximate Query Answering	1999	SIGMOD	0.00029532435
320	DeepDB: Learn from Data, not from Queries!	2020	VLDB	0.00021128745
366	TURL: Table Understanding through Representation Learning	2021	VLDB	0.00019902067
453	An End-to-End Learning-based Cost Estimator	2020	VLDB	0.0001801482
508	NeuroCard: One Cardinality Estimator for All Tables	2021	VLDB	0.00017108973
623	Data Lake Management: Challenges and Opportunities	2019	VLDB	0.00015446839
679	JOSIE: Overlap Set Similarity Search for Finding Joinable Tables in Data Lakes	2019	SIGMOD	0.00014802
689	Cardinality Estimation Done Right: Index-Based Join Sampling	2017	CIDR	0.00014725904
1,064	Are We Ready For Learned Cardinality Estimation?	2021	VLDB	0.00012181459
1,214	Query From Examples: An Iterative, Data-Driven Approach to Query Construction	2015	VLDB	0.00011490045
1,275	Discovering Queries based on Example Tuples	2014	SIGMOD	0.00011213614
1,325	LSH Ensemble: Internet-Scale Domain Search	2016	VLDB	0.000110184
1,333	Auctus: A Dataset Search Engine for Data Discovery and Augmentation	2021	VLDB	0.00010982382
1,742	Semantics-aware Dataset Discovery from Data Lakes with Contextualized Column-based Representation Learning	2023	VLDB	9.7283207e-05
1,929	SANTOS: Relationship-based Semantic Table Union Search	2023	SIGMOD	9.3458857e-05
2,348	Learned Cardinality Estimation: An In-depth Study	2022	SIGMOD	8.5910072e-05
2,370	DeepJoin: Joinable Table Discovery with Pre-trained Language Models	2023	VLDB	8.5469172e-05
2,416	S4: Top-k Spreadsheet-Style Search for Query Discovery	2015	SIGMOD	8.4837888e-05
2,940	Organizing Data Lakes for Navigation	2020	SIGMOD	7.8206062e-05
3,060	A Unified Deep Model of Learning from both Data and Queries for Cardinality Estimation	2021	SIGMOD	7.6828463e-05
3,503	Example-Driven Query Intent Discovery: Abductive Reasoning using Semantic Similarity	2019	VLDB	7.2305074e-05
4,158	Integrating Data Lake Tables	2023	VLDB	6.7595989e-05
4,335	ArcheType: A Novel Framework for Open-Source Column Type Annotation using Large Language Models	2024	VLDB	6.6432811e-05
4,419	LakeBench: A Benchmark for Discovering Joinable and Unionable Tables in Data Lakes	2024	VLDB	6.5905711e-05
4,643	Pivot-based Metric Indexing	2017	VLDB	6.4734189e-05
5,041	MATE: Multi-Attribute Table Extraction	2022	VLDB	6.2899676e-05
5,383	SchemaPile: A Large Collection of Relational Database Schemas	2024	SIGMOD	6.1379374e-05
5,423	RONIN: Data Lake Exploration	2021	VLDB	6.1230414e-05
6,504	Nexus: Correlation Discovery over Collections of Spatio-Temporal Tabular Data	2024	SIGMOD	5.7456631e-05
6,614	Solo: Data Discovery Using Natural Language Questions Via A Self-Supervised Approach	2023	SIGMOD	5.7164731e-05
6,840	ASM: Harmonizing Autoregressive Model, Sampling, and Multi-dimensional Statistics Merging for Cardinality Estimation	2024	SIGMOD	5.6513231e-05
7,107	WarpGate: A Semantic Join Discovery System for Cloud Data Warehouses	2023	CIDR	5.5818446e-05
7,239	DICE: Data Discovery by Example	2021	VLDB	5.5621794e-05
7,787	RECA: Related Tables Enhanced Column Semantic Type Annotation Framework	2023	VLDB	5.4356666e-05
8,552	A Demonstration of KGLac: A Data Discovery and Enrichment Platform for Data Science	2021	VLDB	5.3024397e-05
9,054	Fainder: A Fast and Accurate Index for Distribution-Aware Dataset Search	2024	VLDB	5.2149206e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	3,503	Example-Driven Query Intent Discovery: Abductive Reasoning using Semantic Similarity	2019	VLDB
2	1,275	Discovering Queries based on Example Tuples	2014	SIGMOD
3	10,232	Featurized-Decomposition Join: Low-Cost Semantic Joins with Guarantees	2026	VLDB
4	4,220	SEMA-JOIN: Joining Semantically-Related Tables Using Big Table Corpora	2015	VLDB
5	7,107	WarpGate: A Semantic Join Discovery System for Cloud Data Warehouses	2023	CIDR
6	4,419	LakeBench: A Benchmark for Discovering Joinable and Unionable Tables in Data Lakes	2024	VLDB
7	1,742	Semantics-aware Dataset Discovery from Data Lakes with Contextualized Column-based Representation Learning	2023	VLDB
8	11,086	Lory-j: Location-aware Join Discovery from Data Lakes	2026	VLDB
9	2,370	DeepJoin: Joinable Table Discovery with Pre-trained Language Models	2023	VLDB
10	10,964	MosaicJoin: Compact Semantic Sketches for Value-Level Join Discovery	2026	VLDB