Sinew: A SQL System for Multi-Structured Data

Summary: Sinew is a SQL system for multi-structured data, preserving SQL access while embracing JSON-based formats. It stores arbitrary key-value documents in columns and exposes a dynamic relational view for standard SQL, delivering strong gains over JSON/MongoDB. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: hb21a1f1dc95741ca
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2014
Pagerank: 9.7324334e-05
Overall Rank: 1,745 | 88.28%
DOI: 10.1145/2588555.2612183

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Daniel Tahara (Yale University)
2. Thaddeus Diamond (Hadapt)
3. Daniel J. Abadi (Hadapt; Yale University)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{tahara_sigmod14,
        title = {{Sinew: A SQL System for Multi-Structured Data}},
        author = {Tahara, Daniel and Diamond, Thaddeus and Abadi, Daniel J.},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '14},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/2588555.2612183},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2588555.2612183},
        year = {2014}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 16 of 16 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
23	Spark SQL: Relational Data Processing in Spark	2015	SIGMOD	0.00055384955
2,348	Filter Before You Parse: Faster Analytics on Raw Data with Sparser	2018	VLDB	8.5972138e-05
2,437	Mison: A Fast JSON Parser for Data Analytics	2017	VLDB	8.4668658e-05
3,505	Fast Queries Over Heterogeneous Data Through Engine Customization	2016	VLDB	7.2474175e-05
3,917	JSON Tiles: Fast Analytics on Semi-Structured Data	2021	SIGMOD	6.925328e-05
4,091	Automatic Generation of Normalized Relational Schemas from Nested Key-Value Data	2016	SIGMOD	6.8116205e-05
6,520	Exploiting Common Patterns for Tree-Structured Data	2017	SIGMOD	5.7552712e-05
7,460	Closing the functional and Performance Gap between SQL and NoSQL	2016	SIGMOD	5.5197855e-05
7,699	STEED: An Analytical Database System for TrEE-structured Data	2017	VLDB	5.4742733e-05
8,849	Columnar Formats for Schemaless LSM-based Document Stores	2022	VLDB	5.2640252e-05
9,048	Native JSON Datatype Support: Maturing SQL and NoSQL convergence in Oracle Database	2020	VLDB	5.2306166e-05
9,358	Management of Flexible Schema Data in RDBMSs - Opportunities and Limitations for NoSQL	2015	CIDR	5.1872626e-05
10,071	ReCG: Bottom-Up JSON Schema Discovery Using a Repetitive Cluster-and-Generalize Framework	2024	VLDB	5.0849989e-05
10,720	TurboLynx: Schemaless Graph Engine Strikes Back for General-Purpose Analytics	2026	VLDB	4.9769913e-05
12,191	Integration of Large-Scale Data Processing Systems and Traditional Parallel Database Technology	2019	VLDB	4.9769913e-05
12,444	Tutorial: SQL-on-Hadoop Systems	2015	VLDB	4.9769913e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 10 of 10 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
49	Dremel: Interactive Analysis of Web-Scale Datasets	2010	VLDB	0.0004314366
141	Relational Databases for Querying XML Documents: Limitations and Opportunities	1999	VLDB	0.0002928095
326	Storing Semistructured Data with STORED	1999	SIGMOD	0.00020953829
876	Tenzing: A SQL Implementation On The MapReduce Framework	2011	VLDB	0.00013304112
1,037	Jaql: A Scripting Language for Large Scale Semistructured Data Analysis	2011	VLDB	0.00012371105
1,056	Storage and Querying of E-Commerce Data	2001	VLDB	0.00012243086
1,070	NoDB: Efficient Query Execution on Raw Data Files	2012	SIGMOD	0.00012179575
4,295	The Case for a Wide-Table Approach to Manage Sparse Relational Data Sets	2007	SIGMOD	6.6780197e-05
5,258	Pathfinder: XQuery—The Relational Way	2005	VLDB	6.2050036e-05
5,812	Column Stores For Wide and Sparse Data	2007	CIDR	5.9844567e-05

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