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Most Influential SIGMOD 1990 Paper · 2026-03 edition

Magic Is Relevant

I. S. Mumick; S. J. Finkelstein; Hamid Pirahesh; Raghu Ramakrishnan

Venue
ACM SIGMOD Conference (SIGMOD) 1990
Recognition
Most Influential SIGMOD 1990 Paper (Rank No. 15)
Edition
2026-03
Impact factor
5
Certificate ID
24a56c9f9de283b8

Abstract

We define the magic-sets transformation for traditional relational systems (with duplicates, aggregation and grouping), as well as for relational systems extended with recursion. We compare the magic-sets rewriting to traditional optimization techniques for nonrecursive queries, and use performance experiments to argue that the magic-sets transformation is often a better optimization technique.

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