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: 7.1416697e-05
Overall Rank: 3,642 | 75.52%
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
4,074	Apache Arrow DataFusion: A Fast, Embeddable, Modular Analytic Query Engine	2024	SIGMOD	6.8198673e-05
6,296	Declarative Sub-Operators for Universal Data Processing	2023	VLDB	5.8195258e-05
6,742	Mitigating the Impedance Mismatch between Prediction Query Execution and Database Engine	2025	SIGMOD	5.6910432e-05
7,983	Efficient Execution of User-Defined Functions in SQL Queries	2023	VLDB	5.4131297e-05
9,472	Query Compilation Without Regrets	2024	SIGMOD	5.1711207e-05
9,694	The UDFBench Benchmark for General-purpose UDF Queries	2025	VLDB	5.1396592e-05
10,223	SQL Engines Excel at the Execution of Imperative Programs	2024	VLDB	5.0572221e-05
10,822	Decisionhouse: Prescriptive Analytics in the Data Stack	2026	VLDB	4.9793485e-05
10,832	ReSequel: Robust LLM-assisted Query Rewriting and Optimization using Templatization and Sampling	2026	VLDB	4.9793485e-05
10,884	FlowLog: Efficient and Extensible Datalog via Incrementality	2026	VLDB	4.9793485e-05
10,962	GraphAlg Playground: An Online Platform for Learning and Experimenting with the GraphAlg Language	2026	VLDB	4.9793485e-05
11,133	Scalable Execution of Application Logic within Everest BusinessStore	2025	SIGMOD	4.9793485e-05
11,456	IcedTea: Efficient and Responsive Time-Travel Debugging in Dataflow Systems	2025	VLDB	4.9793485e-05
11,602	Hardware-Efficient Data Imputation through DBMS Extensibility	2024	VLDB	4.9793485e-05
11,797	To UDFs and Beyond: Demonstration of a Fully Decomposed Data Processor for General Data Wrangling Tasks	2023	VLDB	4.9793485e-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	0.00064031282
21	Efficiently Compiling Efficient Query Plans for Modern Hardware	2011	VLDB	0.00056855599
71	DuckDB: an Embeddable Analytical Database	2019	SIGMOD	0.00037720227
105	The MADlib Analytics Library or MAD Skills, the SQL	2012	VLDB	0.00033638251
215	Morsel-Driven Parallelism: A NUMA-Aware Query Evaluation Framework for the Many-Core Age	2014	SIGMOD	0.00024598661
373	Umbra: A Disk-Based System with In-Memory Performance	2020	CIDR	0.00019711632
1,285	SQL/MapReduce: A practical approach to self-describing, polymorphic, and parallelizable user-defined functions	2009	VLDB	0.00011201377
1,444	An Architecture for Compiling UDF-centric Workflows	2015	VLDB	0.0001063181
1,786	Procedural Extensions of SQL: Understanding their usage in the wild	2021	VLDB	9.6326265e-05
2,249	Evaluating End-to-End Optimization for Data Analytics Applications in Weld	2018	VLDB	8.7549752e-05
2,705	Compiling PL/SQL Away	2020	CIDR	8.1111408e-05
3,194	One WITH RECURSIVE is Worth Many GOTOs	2021	SIGMOD	7.5498012e-05
3,873	DBToaster: A SQL Compiler for High-Performance Delta Processing in Main-Memory Databases	2009	VLDB	6.9539394e-05
4,095	Distributed Deep Learning on Data Systems: A Comparative Analysis of Approaches	2021	VLDB	6.8095767e-05
7,386	Lachesis: Automatic Partitioning for UDF-Centric Analytics	2021	VLDB	5.538189e-05
8,673	Adaptive Code Generation for Data-Intensive Analytics	2021	VLDB	5.2913671e-05
9,286	ParaX: Boosting Deep Learning for Big Data Analytics on Many-Core CPUs	2021	VLDB	5.2025256e-05

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#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	3,645	UDO: Universal Database Optimization using Reinforcement Learning	2021	VLDB
2	503	Towards a Unified Architecture for in-RDBMS Analytics	2012	SIGMOD
3	2,516	Optimization of Queries with User-defined Predicates	1996	VLDB
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7	9,694	The UDFBench Benchmark for General-purpose UDF Queries	2025	VLDB
8	9,989	One-pass Data Mining Algorithms in a DBMS with UDFs	2011	SIGMOD
9	4,726	User-Defined Table Operators: Enhancing Extensibility for ORDBMS	1999	VLDB
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