Breaking It Down: An In-depth Study of Index Advisors

Summary: Systematically decomposes index advisors into three workflow blocks, taxonomy, and evaluates 17 methods across 11 datasets/systems. An open-source testbed, ablations, and explainable ML expose robustness, scenario fit, and key performance drivers. (summarized by gpt-5.6-luna on Jul 24 2026)

Paper ID: hcea518a28a8d6bb9
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2024
Pagerank: 5.863893e-05
Overall Rank: 6,121 | 58.98%
DOI: 10.14778/3675034.3675035
PDF: Download (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Wei Zhou (Xiamen University)
2. Chen Lin (Xiamen University)
3. Xuanhe Zhou (Tsinghua University)
4. Guoliang Li (Tsinghua University)

BibTeX Citation

@article{zhou_vldb24,
        title = {{Breaking It Down: An In-depth Study of Index Advisors}},
        author = {Zhou, Wei and Lin, Chen and Zhou, Xuanhe and Li, Guoliang},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '24},
        volume = {17},
        number = {10},
        pages = {2405--2418},
        doi = {10.14778/3675034.3675035},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/3675034.3675035},
        year = {2024}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 13 of 13 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
4,004	Cracking SQL Barriers: An LLM-based Dialect Translation System	2025	SIGMOD	6.846192e-05
8,782	A New Paradigm in Tuning Learned Indexes: A Reinforcement Learning Enhanced Approach	2025	SIGMOD	5.2647219e-05
8,798	Automatic Indexing in Oracle	2025	VLDB	5.2606925e-05
9,662	Low Rank Learning for Offline Query Optimization	2025	SIGMOD	5.1283524e-05
10,494	Automating Database-Native Function Code Synthesis with LLMs	2026	SIGMOD	4.9605343e-05
10,608	Rainbow: Risk-aware Index Benefit Estimation Facing Out Of Distribution Workloads	2026	SIGMOD	4.9605343e-05
10,653	MCTuner: Spatial Decomposition-Enhanced Database Tuning via LLM-Guided Exploration	2026	SIGMOD	4.9605343e-05
10,753	RIB: Robust Learning-based Index Benefit Estimation	2026	SIGMOD	4.9605343e-05
10,787	DBAIOps: A Reasoning LLM-Enhanced Database Operation and Maintenance System using Knowledge Graphs	2026	VLDB	4.9605343e-05
10,988	Evaluating the Practical Effectiveness of LLM-Driven Index Tuning on Microsoft SQL Server	2026	VLDB	4.9605343e-05
11,010	Bridging NL2SQL for CAN Signal Analytics at NIO: From Externalized Schemas to CTE Pipelines	2026	VLDB	4.9605343e-05
11,288	Esc: An Early-Stopping Checker for Budget-aware Index Tuning	2025	VLDB	4.9605343e-05
13,653	DBCooker: A Database Kernel-Specialized Coding Agent Harness	2026	VLDB	-

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 31 of 31 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
15	How Good Are Query Optimizers, Really?	2016	VLDB	0.00061463175
40	The Case for Learned Index Structures	2018	SIGMOD	0.00046249672
84	Learned Cardinalities: Estimating Correlated Joins with Deep Learning	2019	CIDR	0.00035920657
151	An Efficient, Cost-Driven Index Selection Tool for Microsoft SQL Server	1997	VLDB	0.00028611216
236	OLTP-Bench: An Extensible Testbed for Benchmarking Relational Databases	2014	VLDB	0.00023639649
453	An End-to-End Learning-based Cost Estimator	2020	VLDB	0.0001801482
756	Automatic Physical Database Tuning: A Relaxation-based Approach	2005	SIGMOD	0.00014209974
983	Cardinality Estimation in DBMS: A Comprehensive Benchmark Evaluation	2022	VLDB	0.00012677179
1,064	Are We Ready For Learned Cardinality Estimation?	2021	VLDB	0.00012181459
1,282	AI Meets AI: Leveraging Query Executions to Improve Index Recommendations	2019	SIGMOD	0.00011197535
1,400	Magic mirror in my hand, which is the best in the land? An Experimental Evaluation of Index Selection Algorithms	2020	VLDB	0.00010759064
1,513	DSB: A Decision Support Benchmark for Workload-Driven and Traditional Database Systems	2021	VLDB	0.00010394557
1,517	Automatically Indexing Millions of Databases in Microsoft Azure SQL Database	2019	SIGMOD	0.00010385462
1,823	CoPhy: A Scalable, Portable, and Interactive Index Advisor for Large Workloads	2011	VLDB	9.5457638e-05
2,169	QueryFormer: A Tree Transformer Model for Query Plan Representation	2022	VLDB	8.9151935e-05
2,348	Learned Cardinality Estimation: An In-depth Study	2022	SIGMOD	8.5910072e-05
2,523	Learned Cardinality Estimation: A Design Space Exploration and A Comparative Evaluation	2022	VLDB	8.3316032e-05
3,269	Robust Query Driven Cardinality Estimation under Changing Workloads	2023	VLDB	7.463682e-05
3,687	openGauss: An Autonomous Database System	2021	VLDB	7.0797286e-05
4,068	Semi-Automatic Index Tuning: Keeping DBAs in the Loop	2012	VLDB	6.8083363e-05
4,459	Warper: Efficiently Adapting Learned Cardinality Estimators to Data and Workload Drifts	2022	SIGMOD	6.5757572e-05
4,489	Real-time Workload Pattern Analysis for Large-scale Cloud Databases	2023	VLDB	6.5619575e-05
4,508	LearnedSQLGen: Constraint-aware SQL Generation using Reinforcement Learning	2022	SIGMOD	6.5553854e-05
4,726	Learned Index Benefits: Machine Learning Based Index Performance Estimation	2022	VLDB	6.4329878e-05
4,990	Budget-aware Index Tuning with Reinforcement Learning	2022	SIGMOD	6.3120056e-05
5,645	ISUM: Efficiently Compressing Large and Complex Workloads for Scalable Index Tuning	2022	SIGMOD	6.0354456e-05
6,768	Multi-Tenant Cloud Data Services: State-of-the-Art, Challenges and Opportunities	2022	SIGMOD	5.6693759e-05
7,921	DISTILL: Low-Overhead Data-Driven Techniques for Filtering and Costing Indexes for Scalable Index Tuning	2022	VLDB	5.4098206e-05
8,367	A Comparison of Flexible Schemas for Software as a Service	2009	SIGMOD	5.3296125e-05
8,372	Towards Building Autonomous Data Services on Azure	2023	SIGMOD	5.3287108e-05
9,213	FEBench: A Benchmark for Real-Time Relational Data Feature Extraction	2023	VLDB	5.1926696e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	1,527	On the Analysis of Indexing Schemes	1997	PODS
2	1,400	Magic mirror in my hand, which is the best in the land? An Experimental Evaluation of Index Selection Algorithms	2020	VLDB
3	4,990	Budget-aware Index Tuning with Reinforcement Learning	2022	SIGMOD
4	10,988	Evaluating the Practical Effectiveness of LLM-Driven Index Tuning on Microsoft SQL Server	2026	VLDB
5	11,678	Looking Deeply into the Magic Mirror: An Interactive Analysis of Database Index Selection Approaches	2024	VLDB
6	2,590	Are Updatable Learned Indexes Ready?	2022	VLDB
7	7,989	Leveraging Dynamic and Heterogeneous Workload Knowledge to Boost the Performance of Index Advisors	2024	VLDB
8	11,424	Benchmarking Adaptive Multidimensional Indices	2025	VLDB
9	3,632	Learned Index: A Comprehensive Experimental Evaluation	2023	VLDB
10	4,726	Learned Index Benefits: Machine Learning Based Index Performance Estimation	2022	VLDB