thedixitjain VLDB Related Work
Use this to pressure-test novelty before writing the contribution list. The database field has forty-plus years of proceedings and a reviewer pool with long memories; the classic VLDB rejection is not "compared badly" but "reinvented, without knowing it."
The reinvention audit
Before claiming a technique is new, sweep three strata:
- The deep canon (1975-2000) — partitioning, replication, buffering, adaptive query processing, and materialization ideas recur under new hardware. Search old VLDB/SIGMOD proceedings and TODS for the mechanism, not today's terminology for it.
- The modern venue ring — PVLDB itself, SIGMOD/PACMMOD, ICDE, EDBT, CIDR, plus the systems conferences (SOSP/OSDI, NSDI, EuroSys) where storage and dataflow work also lands.
- Running code — features shipped in PostgreSQL, RocksDB, DuckDB, Spark, or the cloud warehouses count as prior art whether or not a paper exists. Citing a system's documentation is normal here; pretending an implemented idea is unpublished is a rejection with a hyperlink.
If the mechanism existed, the honest contribution is the delta: new hardware assumptions, new scale, new workload class, or the first measured comparison.
Lane coverage check
| Literature lane | The reviewer question it answers |
|---|---|
| Classic DB canon | Did they know this was tried in 1994? |
| Current PVLDB/SIGMOD/ICDE | Is the nearest recent method compared or distinguished? |
| Systems venues | Is the OS/distributed-systems version of this idea acknowledged? |
| Industrial systems & open source | Does a shipping engine already do it? |
| Theory (PODS/ICDT) | Are known bounds or hardness results respected? |
A related-work section drawing on only one lane signals a half-searched field.
Concurrency on a rolling calendar
Monthly deadlines mean near-neighbors surface during your review window.
- Sweep arXiv and the latest PVLDB issues in the week before your abstract registration; issues appear monthly, not annually.
- Work published after your submission date is concurrent: acknowledge it in the revision or camera-ready neutrally, without priority anxiety.
- If a concurrent paper lands mid-revision, address it in the change document factually — the same board is likely reviewing both.
Extended versions and overlap
- Prior workshop or demo versions: declare them and state the delta; a PVLDB research paper must carry substantial new content over them (exact overlap thresholds: 待核实 on the live volume guidelines).
- Do not hold the same work under review at PVLDB and another venue simultaneously; rolling cadence makes "just try both" tempting and detectable — the communities share a review pool.
- The later journal expansion (The VLDB Journal, TODS) is the sanctioned lane for outgrowing the 12 pages.
Writing the positioning paragraphs
Per nearest neighbor (3-5 of them):
[Name + venue + year] does <mechanism> under <assumption>.
We differ in <assumption/scale/workload>, which matters because <consequence>.
Compared in §<eval section> / not comparable because <honest reason>.
Group remaining citations by problem, one clause of contrast each. A citation without a contrast is bibliography, not positioning.
Output format
[Reinvention audit] clean / hits found (mechanism, source, year)
[Lane coverage] <lanes with gaps>
[Nearest neighbors] <3-5, each with the distinguishing assumption>
[Concurrent-work watch] <items surfaced this month>
[Overlap declarations] <prior versions and their deltas>
[Novelty sentence] <one sentence a skeptical builder would accept>
Source: brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills → VLDB-Skills/skills/vldb-related-work/SKILL.md