Rethinking SIMD Vectorization for In-Memory Databases

Summary: Novel SIMD vectorized operators for in-memory DBs using gathers/scatters (selections, hashes, partitioning, sorting, joins). On MIC Xeon Phi and mainstream CPUs, up to 10x faster than prior work; highlights algorithmic and power-efficiency implications across simple vs. complex cores. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: h9c8cc932ac55b758
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2015
Pagerank: 0.00015454197
Overall Rank: 627 | 95.79%
DOI: 10.1145/2723372.2747645

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Orestis Polychroniou (Columbia University)
2. Arun Raghavan (Oracle)
3. Kenneth A. Ross (Columbia University)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{polychroniou_sigmod15,
        title = {{Rethinking SIMD Vectorization for In-Memory Databases}},
        author = {Polychroniou, Orestis and Raghavan, Arun and Ross, Kenneth A.},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '15},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/2723372.2747645},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2723372.2747645},
        year = {2015}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 50 of 52 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
907	Data Blocks: Hybrid OLTP and OLAP on Compressed Storage using both Vectorization and Compilation	2016	SIGMOD	0.00013157412
1,267	An Experimental Comparison of Thirteen Relational Equi-Joins in Main Memory	2016	SIGMOD	0.00011265987
1,269	A Study of the Fundamental Performance Characteristics of GPUs and CPUs for Database Analytics	2020	SIGMOD	0.00011254742
1,341	Relaxed Operator Fusion for In-Memory Databases: Making Compilation, Vectorization, and Prefetching Work Together At Last	2018	VLDB	0.00010963427
1,423	Procella: Unifying serving and analytical data at YouTube	2019	VLDB	0.00010715412
1,473	Voodoo - A Vector Algebra for Portable Database Performance on Modern Hardware	2016	VLDB	0.00010552993
1,487	Photon: A Fast Query Engine for Lakehouse Systems	2022	SIGMOD	0.00010516813
1,846	Morton Filters: Faster, Space-Efficient Cuckoo Filters via Biasing, Compression, and Decoupled Logical Sparsity	2018	VLDB	9.511501e-05
1,974	Decomposed Bounded Floats for Fast Compression and Queries	2021	VLDB	9.2806652e-05
2,460	Query Processing on Tensor Computation Runtimes	2022	VLDB	8.4308406e-05
2,816	GPL: A GPU-based Pipelined Query Processing Engine	2016	SIGMOD	7.9740083e-05
2,818	To Partition, or Not to Partition, That is the Join Question in a Real System	2021	SIGMOD	7.9703078e-05
2,954	Column Sketches: A Scan Accelerator for Rapid and Robust Predicate Evaluation	2018	SIGMOD	7.8119682e-05
3,003	ClickHouse - Lightning Fast Analytics for Everyone	2024	VLDB	7.7631056e-05
3,182	The FastLanes Compression Layout: Decoding >100 Billion Integers per Second with Scalar Code	2023	VLDB	7.5589507e-05
3,597	Access Path Selection in Main-Memory Optimized Data Systems: Should I Scan or Should I Probe?	2017	SIGMOD	7.1759026e-05
3,628	Triton Join: Efficiently Scaling to a Large Join State on GPUs with Fast Interconnects	2022	SIGMOD	7.1490678e-05
3,711	CoroBase: Coroutine-Oriented Main-Memory Database Engine	2021	VLDB	7.0757906e-05
3,775	Hardware-conscious Query Processing in GPU-accelerated Analytical Engines	2019	CIDR	7.0261504e-05
4,575	Accelerating Raw Data Analysis with the ACCORDA Software and Hardware Architecture	2019	VLDB	6.5234168e-05
4,932	FPGA-based Data Partitioning	2017	SIGMOD	6.3455411e-05
5,545	Charting the Design Space of Query Execution using VOILA	2021	VLDB	6.0860849e-05
5,599	Database Processing-in-Memory: An Experimental Study	2020	VLDB	6.0685498e-05
5,619	BinDex: A Two-Layered Index for Fast and Robust Scans	2020	SIGMOD	6.0602908e-05
6,216	Data Partitioning for In-Memory Systems: Myths, Challenges, and Opportunities	2019	CIDR	5.8451996e-05
6,282	Rethinking MIMD-SIMD Interplay for Analytical Query Processing in In-Memory Database Engines	2025	CIDR	5.821952e-05
6,395	Selection Pushdown in Column Stores using Bit Manipulation Instructions	2023	SIGMOD	5.7981019e-05
6,419	MorphStore: Analytical Query Engine with a Holistic Compression-Enabled Processing Model	2020	VLDB	5.7886634e-05
6,675	Composable Data Management: An Execution Overview	2024	VLDB	5.7114624e-05
6,966	BSX : Subgraph Matching with Batch Backtracking Search	2025	SIGMOD	5.6301341e-05
7,419	Is Perfect Hashing Practical for OLAP Systems?	2024	CIDR	5.5305461e-05
7,455	Modularis: Modular Relational Analytics over Heterogeneous Distributed Platforms	2021	VLDB	5.5210654e-05
7,473	Fast Multi-Column Sorting in Main-Memory Column-Stores	2016	SIGMOD	5.5162245e-05
7,735	Hardware-Oblivious SIMD Parallelism for In-Memory Column-Stores	2020	CIDR	5.4632401e-05
7,808	Analyzing Vectorized Hash Tables Across CPU Architectures	2023	VLDB	5.448023e-05
8,093	Stackless Processing of Streamed Trees	2021	PODS	5.3917406e-05
8,280	Scaling GPU-Accelerated Databases beyond GPU Memory Size	2025	VLDB	5.3616863e-05
8,385	Interleaved Multi-Vectorizing	2020	VLDB	5.3404356e-05
8,541	Cabin: a Compressed Adaptive Binned Scan Index	2024	SIGMOD	5.3190248e-05
8,681	Adaptive Code Generation for Data-Intensive Analytics	2021	VLDB	5.288863e-05
9,225	Chasing Similarity: Distribution-aware Aggregation Scheduling	2019	VLDB	5.2032183e-05
9,438	Efficiently Joining Large Relations on Multi-GPU Systems	2025	VLDB	5.1761941e-05
9,990	BIPie: Fast Selection and Aggregation on Encoded Data using Operator Specialization	2018	SIGMOD	5.098713e-05
10,268	Automating Vectorized Distributed Graph Computation	2024	SIGMOD	5.0480912e-05
10,311	Data Chunk Compaction in Vectorized Execution	2025	SIGMOD	5.0376863e-05
10,313	Simple (yet Efficient) Function Authoring for Vectorized Engines	2024	VLDB	5.0376863e-05
10,666	LiveBin: A Localized and Version-Aware Binned Scan Index	2026	SIGMOD	4.9769913e-05
10,924	Reaching the Pinnacle of TPC-DS: Co-design of Architecture, Executor, and Storage in TDSQL	2026	VLDB	4.9769913e-05
11,400	GraphAr: An Efficient Storage Scheme for Graph Data in Data Lakes	2025	VLDB	4.9769913e-05
11,470	Program your (custom) SIMD instruction set on FPGA in C++	2024	CIDR	4.9769913e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 21 of 21 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
14	MonetDB/X100: Hyper-Pipelining Query Execution	2005	CIDR	0.00064013679
21	Efficiently Compiling Efficient Query Plans for Modern Hardware	2011	VLDB	0.00056835296
27	Database Architecture Optimized for the New Bottleneck: Memory Access	1999	VLDB	0.00051576613
163	DB2 with BLU Acceleration: So Much More than Just a Column Store	2013	VLDB	0.00027480091
210	Sort vs. Hash Revisited: Fast Join Implementation on Modern Multi-Core CPUs	2009	VLDB	0.00024844328
215	Morsel-Driven Parallelism: A NUMA-Aware Query Evaluation Framework for the Many-Core Age	2014	SIGMOD	0.00024589307
219	SIMD-Scan: Ultra Fast in-Memory Table Scan using on-Chip Vector Processing Units	2009	VLDB	0.00024367137
251	Multi-Core, Main-Memory Joins: Sort vs. Hash Revisited	2014	VLDB	0.00023136934
277	FAST: Fast Architecture Sensitive Tree Search on Modern CPUs and GPUs	2010	SIGMOD	0.00022320139
287	Implementing Database Operations Using SIMD Instructions	2002	SIGMOD	0.00022001327
362	Design and Evaluation of Main Memory Hash Join Algorithms for Multi-core CPUs	2011	SIGMOD	0.00019999596
425	Massively Parallel Sort-Merge Joins in Main Memory Multi-Core Database Systems	2012	VLDB	0.00018485358
663	Fast Sort on CPUs and GPUs: A Case for Bandwidth Oblivious SIMD Sort	2010	SIGMOD	0.00014997516
723	Efficient Implementation of Sorting on Multi-Core SIMD CPU Architecture	2008	VLDB	0.00014507399
997	What happens during a Join? Dissecting CPU and Memory Optimization Effects	2000	VLDB	0.00012628913
1,116	A Comprehensive Study of Main-Memory Partitioning and its Application to Large-Scale Comparison- and Radix-Sort	2014	SIGMOD	0.00011957053
1,531	Column Imprints: A Secondary Index Structure	2013	SIGMOD	0.00010344951
3,432	Cache-Conscious Radix-Decluster Projections	2004	VLDB	7.300628e-05
3,458	Improving Main Memory Hash Joins on Intel Xeon Phi Processors: An Experimental Approach	2015	VLDB	7.2815031e-05
9,137	Automatic Contention Detection and Amelioration for Data-Intensive Operations	2010	SIGMOD	5.2212555e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	8,385	Interleaved Multi-Vectorizing	2020	VLDB
2	723	Efficient Implementation of Sorting on Multi-Core SIMD CPU Architecture	2008	VLDB
3	605	Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Compiled and Vectorized Queries But Were Afraid to Ask	2018	VLDB
4	7,808	Analyzing Vectorized Hash Tables Across CPU Architectures	2023	VLDB
5	5,599	Database Processing-in-Memory: An Experimental Study	2020	VLDB
6	219	SIMD-Scan: Ultra Fast in-Memory Table Scan using on-Chip Vector Processing Units	2009	VLDB
7	7,735	Hardware-Oblivious SIMD Parallelism for In-Memory Column-Stores	2020	CIDR
8	6,282	Rethinking MIMD-SIMD Interplay for Analytical Query Processing in In-Memory Database Engines	2025	CIDR
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