ICDE Influential Paper Awards

ICDE 2015

Michael Stonebraker, Ugur Çetintemel
“One Size Fits All”: An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone. ICDE 2005

Citation: This paper asks the question whether we should continue to build general-purpose database systems or whether we should start building special-purpose systems that address a specific class of workloads. This question has raised heavy and ongoing debates in both industry and academia since 2005. The paper makes a case for special-purpose systems because they can achieve orders of magnitude better performance for their specific target workload.

ICDE 2014

Jeffrey Considine, Feifei Li, George Kollios, John W. Byers
Approximate aggregation techniques for sensor databases. ICDE 2004

Citation: The paper describes novel methods to handle duplicate-sensitive aggregates over distributed datasets. It carefully extends the duplicate-insensitive Flajolet-Martin method, adapting it to require little computation and communication efforts, and make it robust to link losses. This work has been highly impactful in the area of sensor networks, and has been shown to be applicable to any setting with multiple data sources that may suffer network failures, such as distributed data centers of today.

ICDE 2013

Alon Y. Halevy Zachary G. Ives Dan Suciu Igor Tatarinov
Schema Mediation in Peer Data Management Systems. ICDE 2003

Sergey Melnik, Hector Garcia-Molina, Erhard Rahm: Similarity Flooding
A Versatile Graph Matching Algorithm and its Application to Schema Matching. ICDE 2002

Citation: Together, these two papers describe techniques to match and mediate schemas. They show how to exploit schema structures for matching, how peer data management forms a next logical step for data integration research, and how to mediate among schemas in peer-to-peer settings. The proposed techniques are scalable and elegant, and have significantly influenced subsequent research in schema matching and peer data management.

ICDE 2012

Sanjay Agrawal, Surajit Chaudhuri, Gautam Das: DBXplorer
A System for Keyword-Based Search over Relational Databases. ICDE 2002

Gaurav Bhalotia, Arvind Hulgeri, Charuta Nakhe, Soumen Chakrabarti, S. Sudarshan
Keyword Searching and Browsing in Databases using BANKS. ICDE 2002

Citation: Together, these two papers from ICDE 2002 laid the foundations for keyword search over relational databases, paving the way for a significant body of follow-on work in the area of Information Retrieval and Databases. The solutions presented in these papers are elegant and highly effective.

ICDE 2011

Stephan Börzsönyi, Donald Kossmann, Konrad Stocker
The Skyline Operator, ICDE 2001

Citation: Skyline computation (a.k.a. the maximum vector problem) is a fundamental concept in multi-criteria decision making. This highly influential paper opened a new research topic in the database community. It framed the skyline concept in a database setting and offered a study of fundamental techniques for skyline query processing. The paper laid a solid foundation for a multitude of studies that have refined the concept of skylining and proposed efficient implementations in a variety of settings.

ICDE 2009

Kin-pong Chan, Ada Wai-Chee Fu
Efficient Time Series Matching by Wavelets, ICDE 1999.

Citation: This paper proposed the first efficient time-series indexing method by making use of discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and greatly influenced subsequent work on indexing of time series. It also showed that DFT (Discrete Fourier Transform) may not be the best representation for dimensionality reduction in time series, leading to significant research into alternative representations as well as wavelet-based scalable data analysis.

ICDE 2008

Rakesh Agrawal and Ramakrishnan Srikant
Mining Sequential Patterns, ICDE 1995.

Citation: This paper launched a new area in data mining. Sequential pattern mining has since become an important and active area with a variety of applications and much published work. The paper is a milestone in the field of data mining.

ICDE 2007

Kenneth Salem and Hector Garcia-Molina
Disk Striping, ICDE 1986.

Citation: This early paper on disk striping significantly influenced subsequent work on RAID storage.

ICDE 2006

Jim Gray, Adam Bosworth, Andrew Layman, Hamid Pirahesh
Data Cube: A Relational Aggregation Operator Generalizing Group-By, Cross-Tab, and Sub-Total, ICDE 1996

Citation: This seminal paper defined a simple SQL construct that enables one to efficiently compute aggregations over all combinations of group-by columns in a single query, where previous approaches required multiple queries. This feature has had significant impact on industry and is now incorporated in all major database systems.

ICDE 2005

Goetz Graefe, William J. McKenna
The Volcano Optimizer Generator: Extensibility and Efficient Search. ICDE 1993.

Citation: This seminal paper laid the foundation for transformation-based query optimizers. Volcano was the first optimizer framework based on this approach and inspired several others. Multiple commercial database systems rely on transformation-based query optimizers.