The Case for a Wide-Table Approach to Manage Sparse Relational Data Sets

Summary: Argues sparsity across hundreds of attributes is best handled with a single wide table, not sparse schemas. Proposes facilities for multi-attribute queries and fast processing on wide sparse tables, enabling self-managing DBs by reducing schema overhead. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: hada4e299aea5a4dd
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2007
Pagerank: 6.6809755e-05
Overall Rank: 4,295 | 71.13%
DOI: 10.1145/1247480.1247571

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Eric Chu (University of Wisconsin)
2. Jennifer Beckmann (Microsoft; University of Wisconsin)
3. Jeffrey Naughton (University of Wisconsin)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{chu_sigmod07,
        title = {{The Case for a Wide-Table Approach to Manage Sparse Relational Data Sets}},
        author = {Chu, Eric and Beckmann, Jennifer and Naughton, Jeffrey},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '07},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/1247480.1247571},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1247480.1247571},
        year = {2007}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 6 of 6 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
954	RDF-3X: a RISC-style Engine for RDF	2008	VLDB	0.00012867202
1,743	Sinew: A SQL System for Multi-Structured Data	2014	SIGMOD	9.7368807e-05
2,477	A Relational Approach to Incrementally Extracting and Querying Structure in Unstructured Data	2007	VLDB	8.4079432e-05
8,289	Relational Support for Flexible Schema Scenarios	2008	VLDB	5.3614788e-05
8,350	A Comparison of Flexible Schemas for Software as a Service	2009	SIGMOD	5.3498251e-05
12,657	Schema-As-You-Go: On Probabilistic Tagging and Querying of Wide Tables	2011	SIGMOD	4.9793485e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 5 of 5 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
38	DISCOVER: Keyword Search in Relational Databases	2002	VLDB	0.00047394041
151	An Efficient, Cost-Driven Index Selection Tool for Microsoft SQL Server	1997	VLDB	0.00028672526
505	Schema-Free XQuery	2004	VLDB	0.00017161757
1,056	Storage and Querying of E-Commerce Data	2001	VLDB	0.00012248386

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