On the Complexity of the View-Selection Problem

Summary: Shows greedy can be Ω(n) (≥n/12) suboptimal, and unless P=NP any poly-time algorithm is n^{1−ε}-inapproximable for infinitely many n, even for bounded-degree/depth posets. Bicriteria (αk) algorithms also fail; view-selection essentially inapproximable, so focus on restricted practical cases and empirical heuristics. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: hfa4f4062ab6a09c6
Venue: PODS
Year: 1999
Pagerank: 7.4855259e-05
Overall Rank: 3,259 | 78.09%
DOI: 10.1145/303976.303993

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Howard Karloff (Georgia Institute of Technology)
2. Milena Mihail (Bell Communications Research; Georgia Institute of Technology)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{karloff_pods99,
        address = {New York, NY, USA},
        series = {{PODS} '99},
        title = {{On the Complexity of the View-Selection Problem}},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/303976.303993},
        doi = {10.1145/303976.303993},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} Symposium on {Principles} of {Database} {Systems}},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        author = {Karloff, Howard and Mihail, Milena},
        year = {1999}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 7 of 7 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
3,222	Graph Cube: On Warehousing and OLAP Multidimensional Networks	2011	SIGMOD	7.5135441e-05
6,715	Optimal Indexing Using Near-Minimal Space [Extended Abstract]	2003	PODS	5.7000336e-05
7,045	The Polynomial Complexity of Fully Materialized Coalesced Cubes	2004	VLDB	5.6138276e-05
8,058	Optimizing Index for Taxonomy Keyword Search	2012	SIGMOD	5.3966407e-05
10,340	Classifier Construction Under Budget Constraints	2022	SIGMOD	5.0167904e-05
10,597	Stochastic Submodular Data Forgetting	2026	SIGMOD	4.9793485e-05
12,092	Minimization of Classifier Construction Cost for Search Queries	2020	SIGMOD	4.9793485e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 1 of 1 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
11	Implementing Data Cubes Efficiently	1996	SIGMOD	0.00071084324

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