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vldb-related-work

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Use when positioning a PVLDB submission against prior literature, covering the deep database canon back to the 1980s VLDB proceedings, the SIGMOD/ICDE/CIDR neighborhood, concurrent work under rolling monthly deadlines, industrial and open-source systems as citable prior art, and overlap declarations for extended versions.

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Source SKILL.md: https://github.com/brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills/blob/HEAD/VLDB-Skills/skills/vldb-related-work/SKILL.md

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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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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 Citing a system's documentation is normal here; pretending an implemented idea is unpublished is a rejection with a hyperlink.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 laneThe reviewer question it answers
Classic DB canonDid they know this was tried in 1994?
Current PVLDB/SIGMOD/ICDEIs the nearest recent method compared or distinguished?
Systems venuesIs the OS/distributed-systems version of this idea acknowledged?
Industrial systems & open sourceDoes 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>