Dwarfs in the Rearview Mirror: How Big are they Really?

Summary: Re-implements Dwarf for OLAP workloads; reproduces key experiments but uncovers orders-of-magnitude differences from prior results. Provides missing comparisons to baseline strategies and explains when Dwarf is practically useful, toward guidelines for practitioners. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: he3a75fafe0ee551d
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2008
Pagerank: 4.9793485e-05
Overall Rank: 12,893 | 13.32%
DOI: 10.14778/1454159.1454205

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

No non-self incoming citations found for this paper in this database.

Authors

1. Jens Dittrich (ETH Zurich)
2. Lukas Blunschi (ETH Zurich)
3. Marcos Antonio Vaz Salles (ETH Zurich)

BibTeX Citation

@article{dittrich_vldb08,
        title = {{Dwarfs in the Rearview Mirror: How Big are they Really?}},
        author = {Dittrich, Jens and Blunschi, Lukas and Salles, Marcos Antonio Vaz},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '08},
        volume = {1},
        number = {2},
        pages = {1586--1597},
        doi = {10.14778/1454159.1454205},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/1454159.1454205},
        year = {2008}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 0 of 0 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank

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
106	Quickly Generating Billion-Record Synthetic Databases	1994	SIGMOD	0.00033526937
114	A Decomposition Storage Model	1985	SIGMOD	0.00031928929
403	Bottom-Up Computation of Sparse and Iceberg CUBEs	1999	SIGMOD	0.0001910396
611	"One Size Fits All" Database Architectures Do Not Work For DSS	1995	SIGMOD	0.00015574329
1,068	Fast Computation of Sparse Datacubes	1997	VLDB	0.00012185465
2,256	Dwarf: Shrinking the PetaCube	2002	SIGMOD	8.7438759e-05
3,850	QC-Trees: An Efficient Summary Structure for Semantic OLAP	2003	SIGMOD	6.9801117e-05
6,142	Data Mining with the SAP NetWeaver BI Accelerator	2006	VLDB	5.8722726e-05
7,045	The Polynomial Complexity of Fully Materialized Coalesced Cubes	2004	VLDB	5.6138276e-05
13,032	Bridging the Gap between OLAP and SQL	2005	VLDB	4.9793485e-05

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