User-Defined Operators: Efficiently Integrating Custom Algorithms into Modern Databases

Summary: Introduces User-Defined Operators (UDOs) to tightly integrate custom algorithms into modern database query engines. Idiomatic code in common languages is plugged directly, avoiding data export, preserving ACID guarantees, and achieving performance competitive with specialized analytics tools. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: hbbc1a05929572b5f
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2022
Pagerank: 7.1147757e-05
Overall Rank: 3,654 | 75.51%
DOI: 10.14778/3510397.3510408
PDF: Download (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Moritz Sichert (Technical University of Munich)
2. Thomas Neumann (Technical University of Munich)

BibTeX Citation

@article{sichert_vldb22,
        title = {{User-Defined Operators: Efficiently Integrating Custom Algorithms into Modern Databases}},
        author = {Sichert, Moritz and Neumann, Thomas},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '22},
        volume = {15},
        number = {5},
        pages = {1119--1131},
        doi = {10.14778/3510397.3510408},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/3510397.3510408},
        year = {2022}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 15 of 15 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
4,095	Apache Arrow DataFusion: A Fast, Embeddable, Modular Analytic Query Engine	2024	SIGMOD	6.7952274e-05
6,305	Declarative Sub-Operators for Universal Data Processing	2023	VLDB	5.8008469e-05
6,765	Mitigating the Impedance Mismatch between Prediction Query Execution and Database Engine	2025	SIGMOD	5.6695399e-05
8,002	Efficient Execution of User-Defined Functions in SQL Queries	2023	VLDB	5.3927693e-05
9,512	Query Compilation Without Regrets	2024	SIGMOD	5.1515819e-05
9,729	The UDFBench Benchmark for General-purpose UDF Queries	2025	VLDB	5.1202393e-05
10,260	SQL Engines Excel at the Execution of Imperative Programs	2024	VLDB	5.0381136e-05
10,893	Decisionhouse: Prescriptive Analytics in the Data Stack	2026	VLDB	4.9605343e-05
10,903	ReSequel: Robust LLM-assisted Query Rewriting and Optimization using Templatization and Sampling	2026	VLDB	4.9605343e-05
10,954	FlowLog: Efficient and Extensible Datalog via Incrementality	2026	VLDB	4.9605343e-05
11,032	GraphAlg Playground: An Online Platform for Learning and Experimenting with the GraphAlg Language	2026	VLDB	4.9605343e-05
11,201	Scalable Execution of Application Logic within Everest BusinessStore	2025	SIGMOD	4.9605343e-05
11,514	IcedTea: Efficient and Responsive Time-Travel Debugging in Dataflow Systems	2025	VLDB	4.9605343e-05
11,655	Hardware-Efficient Data Imputation through DBMS Extensibility	2024	VLDB	4.9605343e-05
11,847	To UDFs and Beyond: Demonstration of a Fully Decomposed Data Processor for General Data Wrangling Tasks	2023	VLDB	4.9605343e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 17 of 17 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	0.00063972112
21	Efficiently Compiling Efficient Query Plans for Modern Hardware	2011	VLDB	0.00056737487
71	DuckDB: an Embeddable Analytical Database	2019	SIGMOD	0.00037688945
105	The MADlib Analytics Library or MAD Skills, the SQL	2012	VLDB	0.00033605348
215	Morsel-Driven Parallelism: A NUMA-Aware Query Evaluation Framework for the Many-Core Age	2014	SIGMOD	0.00024554257
375	Umbra: A Disk-Based System with In-Memory Performance	2020	CIDR	0.00019660459
1,289	SQL/MapReduce: A practical approach to self-describing, polymorphic, and parallelizable user-defined functions	2009	VLDB	0.0001116552
1,449	An Architecture for Compiling UDF-centric Workflows	2015	VLDB	0.00010597074
1,800	Procedural Extensions of SQL: Understanding their usage in the wild	2021	VLDB	9.5999908e-05
2,258	Evaluating End-to-End Optimization for Data Analytics Applications in Weld	2018	VLDB	8.7387151e-05
2,716	Compiling PL/SQL Away	2020	CIDR	8.0819509e-05
3,190	One WITH RECURSIVE is Worth Many GOTOs	2021	SIGMOD	7.5364422e-05
3,886	DBToaster: A SQL Compiler for High-Performance Delta Processing in Main-Memory Databases	2009	VLDB	6.9280841e-05
4,117	Distributed Deep Learning on Data Systems: A Comparative Analysis of Approaches	2021	VLDB	6.784003e-05
7,405	Lachesis: Automatic Partitioning for UDF-Centric Analytics	2021	VLDB	5.5172664e-05
8,701	Adaptive Code Generation for Data-Intensive Analytics	2021	VLDB	5.2714222e-05
9,319	ParaX: Boosting Deep Learning for Big Data Analytics on Many-Core CPUs	2021	VLDB	5.182871e-05

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#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	3,655	UDO: Universal Database Optimization using Reinforcement Learning	2021	VLDB
2	506	Towards a Unified Architecture for in-RDBMS Analytics	2012	SIGMOD
3	2,521	Optimization of Queries with User-defined Predicates	1996	VLDB
4	6,305	Declarative Sub-Operators for Universal Data Processing	2023	VLDB
5	9,736	Using SQL to Build New Aggregates and Extenders for Object-Relational Systems	2000	VLDB
6	5,028	User-Defined Aggregate Functions: Bridging Theory and Practice	2006	SIGMOD
7	9,729	The UDFBench Benchmark for General-purpose UDF Queries	2025	VLDB
8	10,021	One-pass Data Mining Algorithms in a DBMS with UDFs	2011	SIGMOD
9	4,746	User-Defined Table Operators: Enhancing Extensibility for ORDBMS	1999	VLDB
10	8,002	Efficient Execution of User-Defined Functions in SQL Queries	2023	VLDB