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The Aqua Approximate Query Answering System

Summary: Aqua precomputes synopses and rewrites aggregates for fast, approximate results with probabilistic guarantees on any RDBMS. Incremental maintenance keeps synopses up to date as data changes, enabling orders-of-magnitude faster queries when precision is unnecessary. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID
ha7ec66bcb54f928a
Venue
SIGMOD
Year
1999
Pagerank
0.00020593498
Overall Rank
337 | 97.75%
DOI
10.1145/304182.304581

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{acharya_sigmod99,
        title = {{The Aqua Approximate Query Answering System}},
        author = {Acharya, Swarup and Gibbons, Phillip B. and Poosala, Viswanath and Ramaswamy, Sridhar},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '99},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/304182.304581},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/304182.304581},
        year = {1999}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 50 of 59 citing papers.

Rank Citing Paper Year Venue Pagerank
127 Trio: A System for Integrated Management of Data, Accuracy, and Lineage 2005 CIDR 0.00030337791
138 Join Synopses for Approximate Query Answering 1999 SIGMOD 0.00029532435
268 Distinct Sampling for Highly-Accurate Answers to Distinct Values Queries and Event Reports 2001 VLDB 0.00022654182
495 An Optimal Algorithm for the Distinct Elements Problem 2010 PODS 0.00017347522
745 Dynamic Multidimensional Histograms 2002 SIGMOD 0.00014267268
770 VerdictDB: Universalizing Approximate Query Processing 2018 SIGMOD 0.00014086699
841 Quickr: Lazily Approximating Complex AdHoc Queries in BigData Clusters 2016 SIGMOD 0.00013503124
1,065 Approximate Query Processing: No Silver Bullet 2017 SIGMOD 0.00012181098
1,186 ICICLES: Self-tuning Samples for Approximate Query Answering 2000 VLDB 0.00011581468
1,220 Overview of Data Exploration Techniques 2015 SIGMOD 0.00011449992
1,416 Northstar: An Interactive Data Science System 2018 VLDB 0.00010707248
1,570 Crossing the Structure Chasm 2003 CIDR 0.00010176166
1,668 Rapid Sampling for Visualizations with Ordering Guarantees 2015 VLDB 9.9190265e-05
1,693 Global Optimization of Histograms 2001 SIGMOD 9.8377504e-05
1,721 A Sample-and-Clean Framework for Fast and Accurate Query Processing on Dirty Data 2014 SIGMOD 9.7821782e-05
1,804 IDEBench: A Benchmark for Interactive Data Exploration 2020 SIGMOD 9.5971444e-05
1,839 DBEst: Revisiting Approximate Query Processing Engines with Machine Learning Models 2019 SIGMOD 9.5187688e-05
1,874 G-OLA: Generalized On-Line Aggregation for Interactive Analysis on Big Data 2015 SIGMOD 9.4470874e-05
1,924 The Analytical Bootstrap: a New Method for Fast Error Estimation in Approximate Query Processing 2014 SIGMOD 9.3535088e-05
2,014 Sample + Seek: Approximating Aggregates with Distribution Precision Guarantee 2016 SIGMOD 9.1775869e-05
2,040 Database Learning: Toward a Database that Becomes Smarter Every Time 2017 SIGMOD 9.1319608e-05
2,438 Cardinality Estimation Using Sample Views with Quality Assurance 2007 SIGMOD 8.4532693e-05
2,461 A Sampling Algebra for Aggregate Estimation 2013 VLDB 8.4123214e-05
2,682 Relational Confidence Bounds Are Easy With The Bootstrap* 2005 SIGMOD 8.1203255e-05
3,168 REHIST: Relative Error Histogram Construction Algorithms 2004 VLDB 7.5583423e-05
3,269 Robust Query Driven Cardinality Estimation under Changing Workloads 2023 VLDB 7.463682e-05
3,312 Optimal and Approximate Computation of Summary Statistics for Range Aggregates 2001 PODS 7.4165176e-05
3,348 I've Seen "Enough": Incrementally Improving Visualizations to Support Rapid Decision Making 2017 VLDB 7.3783668e-05
3,428 Revisiting Reuse for Approximate Query Processing 2017 VLDB 7.2957009e-05
3,435 AQP++: Connecting Approximate Query Processing With Aggregate Precomputation for Interactive Analytics 2018 SIGMOD 7.2845431e-05
3,658 Davos: A System for Interactive Data-Driven Decision Making 2021 VLDB 7.1100991e-05
4,000 Exploiting Correlations for Expensive Predicate Evaluation 2015 SIGMOD 6.8489751e-05
4,229 Efficient Selection of Geospatial Data on Maps for Interactive and Visualized Exploration 2018 SIGMOD 6.7068084e-05
4,479 Lightweight and Accurate Cardinality Estimation by Neural Network Gaussian Process 2022 SIGMOD 6.5665703e-05
4,822 Rethinking Data Management for Storage-centric Sensor Networks 2007 CIDR 6.3874063e-05
4,895 Estimating arbitrary subset sums with few probes 2005 PODS 6.3498065e-05
4,962 Space efficiency in Synopsis construction algorithms 2005 VLDB 6.3244317e-05
5,049 Adaptive Sampling for Rapidly Matching Histograms 2018 VLDB 6.287033e-05
5,056 Lightweight Cardinality Estimation in LSM-based Systems 2018 SIGMOD 6.282339e-05
5,487 ABS: a System for Scalable Approximate Queries with Accuracy Guarantees 2014 SIGMOD 6.0974772e-05
5,761 Data Streams with Bounded Deletions 2018 PODS 5.9847577e-05
5,885 BlinkML: Efficient Maximum Likelihood Estimation with Probabilistic Guarantees 2019 SIGMOD 5.9421702e-05
6,232 iOLAP: Managing Uncertainty for Efficient Incremental OLAP 2016 SIGMOD 5.8255726e-05
6,300 Mosaic: A Sample-Based Database System for Open World Query Processing 2020 CIDR 5.8017237e-05
6,724 Tempura: A General Cost-Based Optimizer Framework for Incremental Data Processing 2021 VLDB 5.6834238e-05
7,720 Enabling Efficient and General Subpopulation Analytics in Multidimensional Data Streams 2022 VLDB 5.4542911e-05
7,745 PilotDB: Database-Agnostic Online Approximate Query Processing with A Priori Error Guarantees 2025 SIGMOD 5.4457135e-05
8,570 The DBO Database System 2008 SIGMOD 5.298954e-05
8,800 CoopStore: Optimizing Precomputed Summaries for Aggregation 2020 VLDB 5.2602992e-05
9,454 Towards Observability for Production Machine Learning Pipelines 2022 VLDB 5.1607878e-05
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Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 4 of 4 cited papers.

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

Rank Cited Paper Year Venue Pagerank
37 Improved Histograms for Selectivity Estimation of Range Predicates 1996 SIGMOD 0.00047654188
138 Join Synopses for Approximate Query Answering 1999 SIGMOD 0.00029532435
242 Fast Incremental Maintenance of Approximate Histograms 1997 VLDB 0.00023327437
564 Congressional Samples for Approximate Answering of Group-By Queries 2000 SIGMOD 0.00016251304
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