Supporting Top-k Join Queries in Relational Databases

Summary: Rank-join algorithm exploits input orders to produce top-k join results under a user-specified score, ranking during join. Two nonblocking, ripple-join-based operators are integrated in pipelines; a PREDATOR prototype demonstrates superior performance. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: hbc50a430fcb20b42
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2003
Pagerank: 0.00017162373
Overall Rank: 505 | 96.62%
DOI: 10.1016/B978-012722442-8/50072-0

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Ihab F. Ilyas (Purdue University)
2. Walid G. Aref (Purdue University)
3. Ahmed K. Elmagarmid (Purdue University)

BibTeX Citation

@article{ilyas_vldb03,
        title = {{Supporting Top-k Join Queries in Relational Databases}},
        author = {Ilyas, Ihab F. and Aref, Walid G. and Elmagarmid, Ahmed K.},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '03},
        doi = {10.1016/B978-012722442-8/50072-0},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-012722442-8/50072-0},
        year = {2003}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 2 of 52 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
12,815	Building Ranked Mashups of Unstructured Sources with Uncertain Information	2010	VLDB	4.9605343e-05
12,833	Skip-and-Prune: Cosine-based Top-K Query Processing for Efficient Context-Sensitive Document Retrieval	2009	SIGMOD	4.9605343e-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
1	Access Path Selection in a Relational Database Management System	1979	SIGMOD	0.0023948467
5	Optimal Aggregation Algorithms for Middleware [Extended Abstract]	2001	PODS	0.0010688884
110	Optimizing Multi-Feature Queries for Image Databases	2000	VLDB	0.00032662513
135	Ripple Joins for Online Aggregation	1999	SIGMOD	0.00029805026
398	On Saying "Enough Already!" in SQL	1997	SIGMOD	0.00019117739
511	Supporting Incremental Join Queries on Ranked Inputs	2001	VLDB	0.00017061618
840	Minimal Probing: Supporting Expensive Predicates for Top-k Queries	2002	SIGMOD	0.00013521251
1,569	Reducing the Braking Distance of an SQL Query Engine	1998	VLDB	0.00010177494
3,059	Joining Ranked Inputs in Practice	2002	VLDB	7.6838294e-05
3,227	PREDATOR : An OR-DBMS with Enhanced Data Types	1997	SIGMOD	7.4969701e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	4,730	Optimal Join Algorithms Meet Top-k	2020	SIGMOD
2	6,557	Ranked Enumeration of Join Queries with Projections	2022	VLDB
3	1,712	Rank-aware Query Optimization	2004	SIGMOD
4	511	Supporting Incremental Join Queries on Ranked Inputs	2001	VLDB
5	2,625	Evaluating Rank Joins with Optimal Cost	2008	PODS
6	941	RankSQL: Query Algebra and Optimization for Relational Top-k Queries	2005	SIGMOD
7	3,059	Joining Ranked Inputs in Practice	2002	VLDB
8	5,254	Robust and Efficient Algorithms for Rank Join Evaluation	2009	SIGMOD
9	5,954	RankSQL: Supporting Ranking Queries in Relational Database Management Systems	2005	VLDB
10	7,637	Processing Top-k Join Queries	2010	VLDB