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Photon: A Fast Query Engine for Lakehouse Systems

Summary: Photon is a vectorized Lakehouse query engine, delivering fast queries on raw data lakes and Parquet via Spark API. Design choices (vectorization vs. code generation), memory manager, and SQL/Spark integration enable 10x gains and a 100TB TPC-DS record. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID
hb0f25a34e5e93c17
Venue
SIGMOD
Year
2022
Pagerank
0.00010521722
Overall Rank
1,487 | 90.01%
DOI
10.1145/3514221.3526054

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{behm_sigmod22,
        title = {{Photon: A Fast Query Engine for Lakehouse Systems}},
        author = {Behm, Alexander and Palkar, Shoumik and Agarwal, Utkarsh and Armstrong, Timothy and Cashman, David and Dave, Ankur and Greenstein, Todd and Hovsepian, Shant and Johnson, Ryan and Krishnan, Arvind Sai and Leventis, Paul and Luszczak, Ala and Menon, Prashanth and Mokhtar, Mostafa and Pang, Gene and Paranjpye, Sameer and Rahn, Greg and Samwel, Bart and van Bussel, Tom and van Hovell, Herman and Xue, Maryann and Xin, Reynold and Zaharia, Matei},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '22},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/3514221.3526054},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3514221.3526054},
        year = {2022}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 37 of 37 citing papers.

Rank Citing Paper Year Venue Pagerank
2,314 BtrBlocks: Efficient Columnar Compression for Data Lakes 2023 SIGMOD 8.6533171e-05
3,001 ClickHouse - Lightning Fast Analytics for Everyone 2024 VLDB 7.7667824e-05
3,337 The Composable Data Management System Manifesto 2023 VLDB 7.4104865e-05
3,835 Presto: A Decade of SQL Analytics at Meta 2023 SIGMOD 6.9931698e-05
4,034 Exploiting Cloud Object Storage for High-Performance Analytics 2023 VLDB 6.8393244e-05
4,074 Apache Arrow DataFusion: A Fast, Embeddable, Modular Analytic Query Engine 2024 SIGMOD 6.8198673e-05
4,332 Analyzing and Comparing Lakehouse Storage Systems 2023 CIDR 6.6587744e-05
5,348 Adaptive and Robust Query Execution for Lakehouses at Scale 2024 VLDB 6.1690434e-05
5,991 Terabyte-Scale Analytics in the Blink of an Eye 2026 VLDB 5.9247663e-05
6,392 Selection Pushdown in Column Stores using Bit Manipulation Instructions 2023 SIGMOD 5.800848e-05
6,580 Deep Lake: a Lakehouse for Deep Learning 2023 CIDR 5.7445866e-05
6,670 Composable Data Management: An Execution Overview 2024 VLDB 5.7141674e-05
7,416 Is Perfect Hashing Practical for OLAP Systems? 2024 CIDR 5.5331654e-05
7,962 Excalibur: A Virtual Machine for Adaptive Fine-grained JIT-Compiled Query Execution based on VOILA 2023 VLDB 5.4167003e-05
8,271 Sigma Workbook: A Spreadsheet for Cloud Data Warehouses 2022 VLDB 5.3643259e-05
8,637 Magnus: A Holistic Approach to Data Management for Large-Scale Machine Learning Workloads 2025 VLDB 5.2978926e-05
9,472 Query Compilation Without Regrets 2024 SIGMOD 5.1711207e-05
9,684 The HANA Native Query Engine for Lakehouse Systems 2025 VLDB 5.1423628e-05
10,080 LiquidCache: Efficient Pushdown Caching for Cloud-Native Data Analytics 2025 VLDB 5.0830849e-05
10,125 End-to-End Declarative Data Analytics: Co-designing Engines, Interfaces, and Cloud Infrastructure 2026 CIDR 5.0751052e-05
10,193 Towards Unifying Query Interpretation and Compilation 2023 CIDR 5.0633497e-05
10,304 Data Chunk Compaction in Vectorized Execution 2025 SIGMOD 5.0400722e-05
10,306 Simple (yet Efficient) Function Authoring for Vectorized Engines 2024 VLDB 5.0400722e-05
10,311 AnalyticDB-PG: A Cloud-native High-performance Data Warehouse in Alibaba Cloud 2025 VLDB 5.0386264e-05
10,452 Factorized and Vectorized Execution: Optimizing Analytical and Semantic Queries over Relations 2026 SIGMOD 4.9793485e-05
10,857 Interoperable ACID Transactions for Open Table Formats 2026 VLDB 4.9793485e-05
10,901 Overlay Bitmap Encoding for Efficient Consumption of Apache Parquet Files 2026 VLDB 4.9793485e-05
10,911 Hermes at Scale: Powering Distributed Queries with a Unified Memory Fabric 2026 VLDB 4.9793485e-05
10,914 FastCompose: Eliminating Compilation Cold Starts in Query Execution with Composition 2026 VLDB 4.9793485e-05
10,915 Reaching the Pinnacle of TPC-DS: Co-design of Architecture, Executor, and Storage in TDSQL 2026 VLDB 4.9793485e-05
10,927 A Decade of Apache Spark Structured Streaming: How We Evolved The Architecture To Meet Real-World Needs 2026 VLDB 4.9793485e-05
10,941 Ultron: History-Based Query Optimization at Databricks 2026 VLDB 4.9793485e-05
10,944 From Presto to Prestissimo: A Velox-Powered Modernization Journey 2026 VLDB 4.9793485e-05
11,191 Nested Parquet Is Flat, Why Not Use It? How To Scan Nested Data With On-the-Fly Key Generation and Joins 2025 SIGMOD 4.9793485e-05
11,344 Towards Designing Future-Proof Data Processing Systems 2025 VLDB 4.9793485e-05
11,394 GraphAr: An Efficient Storage Scheme for Graph Data in Data Lakes 2025 VLDB 4.9793485e-05
11,779 Big Data Analytic Toolkit: A general-purpose, modular, and heterogeneous acceleration toolkit for data analytical engines 2023 VLDB 4.9793485e-05
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Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 19 of 19 cited papers.

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

Rank Cited Paper Year Venue Pagerank
14 MonetDB/X100: Hyper-Pipelining Query Execution 2005 CIDR 0.00064031282
21 Efficiently Compiling Efficient Query Plans for Modern Hardware 2011 VLDB 0.00056855599
23 Spark SQL: Relational Data Processing in Spark 2015 SIGMOD 0.00055406774
27 Database Architecture Optimized for the New Bottleneck: Memory Access 1999 VLDB 0.0005158963
52 The Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse 2016 SIGMOD 0.00041219077
93 Encapsulation of Parallelism in the Volcano Query Processing System 1990 SIGMOD 0.00034622929
179 The Vertica Analytic Database: C-Store 7 Years Later 2012 VLDB 0.00026611886
287 Implementing Database Operations Using SIMD Instructions 2002 SIGMOD 0.00021970198
384 HaLoop: Efficient Iterative Data Processing on Large Clusters 2010 VLDB 0.0001948031
459 Delta Lake: High-Performance ACID Table Storage over Cloud Object Stores 2020 VLDB 0.00017856221
605 Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Compiled and Vectorized Queries But Were Afraid to Ask 2018 VLDB 0.00015647561
627 Rethinking SIMD Vectorization for In-Memory Databases 2015 SIGMOD 0.00015460957
906 Data Blocks: Hybrid OLTP and OLAP on Compressed Storage using both Vectorization and Compilation 2016 SIGMOD 0.00013160654
950 Lakehouse: A New Generation of Open Platforms that Unify Data Warehousing and Advanced Analytics 2021 CIDR 0.00012895553
1,193 Weld: A Common Runtime for High Performance Data Analytics 2017 CIDR 0.0001158809
1,341 Relaxed Operator Fusion for In-Memory Databases: Making Compilation, Vectorization, and Prefetching Work Together At Last 2018 VLDB 0.00010968512
2,249 Evaluating End-to-End Optimization for Data Analytics Applications in Weld 2018 VLDB 8.7549752e-05
3,100 Micro Adaptivity in Vectorwise 2013 SIGMOD 7.6505054e-05
3,657 Maximizing Persistent Memory Bandwidth Utilization for OLAP Workloads 2021 SIGMOD 7.1244858e-05
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