Publications

Journal Papers

• Yifei Yang, Xiangyao Yu, Marco Serafini, Ashraf Aboulnaga, and Michael Stonebraker.
  FlexpushdownDB: Rethinking Computation Pushdown for Cloud OLAP DBMSs.
  The VLDB Journal (VLDBJ), volume 33, number 5, pages 1643-1670, September 2024.
  Publisher's version
• Aisha Mohamed, Ghadeer Abuoda, Abdurrahman Ghanem, Zoi Kaoudi, and Ashraf Aboulnaga.
  RDFFrames: Knowledge Graph Access for Machine Learning Tools.
  The VLDB Journal (VLDBJ), volume 31, number 2, pages 321-346, March 2022.
  Publisher's version
  • Special issue on big graph data management and processing. This work was demonstrated at VLDB '20.
• Yifei Yang, Matt Youill, Matthew E. Woicik, Yizhou Liu, Xiangyao Yu, Marco Serafini, Ashraf Aboulnaga, and Michael Stonebraker.
  FlexPushdownDB: Hybrid Pushdown and Caching in a Cloud DBMS.
  Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (PVLDB), volume 14, number 11, pages 2101-2113, July 2021.
  Presented at the International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB '21), Copenhagen, Denmark, August 2021.
  Publisher's version
• Xiaowei Zhu, Guanyu Feng, Marco Serafini, Xiaosong Ma, Jiping Yu, Lei Xie, Ashraf Aboulnaga, and Wenguang Chen.
  LiveGraph: A Transactional Graph Storage System with Purely Sequential Adjacency List Scans.
  Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (PVLDB), volume 13, number 7, pages 1020-1034, March 2020.
  Presented at the International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB '20), Virtual Conference, August 2020.
  Publisher's version
• Junjay Tan, Thanaa Ghanem, Matthew Perron, Xiangyao Yu, Michael Stonebraker, David J. DeWitt, Marco Serafini, Ashraf Aboulnaga, and Tim Kraska.
  Choosing a Cloud DBMS: Architectures and Tradeoffs.
  Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (PVLDB), volume 12, number 12, pages 2170-2182, August 2019.
  Presented at the International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB '19), Los Angeles, California, USA, August 2019.
  Publisher's version
• Ibrahim Abdelaziz, Essam Mansour, Mourad Ouzzani, Ashraf Aboulnaga, and Panos Kalnis.
  Lusail: A System for Querying Linked Data at Scale.
  Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (PVLDB), volume 11, number 4, pages 485-498, December 2017.
  Presented at the International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB '18), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, August 2018.
  Publisher's version
  • Extended version of ICDE '17 paper. This work was demonstrated at SIGMOD '17.
• Michael J. Mior, Kenneth Salem, Ashraf Aboulnaga, and Rui Liu.
  NoSE: Schema Design for NoSQL Applications.
  IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), volume 29, number 10, pages 2275-2289, October 2017.
  Publisher's version
  • Extended version of ICDE '16 paper. Special issue for the best papers of ICDE '16.
• Marco Serafini, Rebecca Taft, Aaron J. Elmore, Andrew Pavlo, Ashraf Aboulnaga, and Michael Stonebraker.
  Clay: Fine-Grained Adaptive Partitioning for General Database Schemas.
  Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (PVLDB), volume 10, number 4, pages 445-456, December 2016.
  Presented at the International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB '17), Munich, Germany, August 2017.
  Publisher's version
• Rebecca Taft, Essam Mansour, Marco Serafini, Jennie Duggan, Aaron J. Elmore, Ashraf Aboulnaga, Andrew Pavlo, and Michael Stonebraker.
  E-Store: Fine-Grained Elastic Partitioning for Distributed Transaction Processing.
  Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (PVLDB), volume 8, number 3, pages 245-256, November 2014.
  Presented at the International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB '15), Kohala Coast, Hawaii, USA, August 2015.
  Publisher's version
• Marco Serafini, Essam Mansour, Ashraf Aboulnaga, Kenneth Salem, Taha Rafiq, and Umar Farooq Minhas.
  Accordion: Elastic Scalability for Database Systems Supporting Distributed Transactions.
  Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (PVLDB), volume 7, number 12, pages 1035-1046, August 2014.
  Presented at the International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB '14), Hangzhou, China, September 2014.
  Publisher's version
• Essam Mansour, Ahmed El-Roby, Panos Kalnis, Aron Ahmadia, and Ashraf Aboulnaga.
  RACE: A Scalable and Elastic Parallel System for Discovering Repeats in Very Long Sequences.
  Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (PVLDB), volume 6, number 10, pages 865-876, August 2013.
  Presented at the International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB '13), Riva del Garda, Italy, August 2013.
  Publisher's version
• Iman Elghandour, Ashraf Aboulnaga, Daniel C. Zilio, and Calisto Zuzarte.
  Recommending XML Physical Designs for XML Databases.
  The VLDB Journal (VLDBJ), volume 22, number 4, pages 447-470, August 2013.
  Publisher's version
  • Extended version of XSym '09 and ICDE '08 papers.
• Rui Liu, Ashraf Aboulnaga, and Kenneth Salem.
  DAX: A Widely Distributed Multi-tenant Storage Service for DBMS Hosting.
  Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (PVLDB), volume 6, number 4, pages 253-264, February 2013.
  Presented at the International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB '13), Riva del Garda, Italy, August 2013.
  Publisher's version
• Umar Farooq Minhas, Shriram Rajagopalan, Brendan Cully, Ashraf Aboulnaga, Kenneth Salem, and Andrew Warfield.
  RemusDB: Transparent High Availability for Database Systems.
  The VLDB Journal (VLDBJ), volume 22, number 1, pages 29-45, February 2013.
  Publisher's version
  • Extended version of VLDB '11 paper. Special issue for the best papers of VLDB '11.
• Iman Elghandour and Ashraf Aboulnaga.
  ReStore: Reusing Results of MapReduce Jobs.
  Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (PVLDB), volume 5, number 6, pages 586-597, February 2012.
  Presented at the International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB '12), Istanbul, Turkey, August 2012.
  Publisher's version
  • This work was demonstrated at SIGMOD '12.
• Umar Farooq Minhas, Shriram Rajagopalan, Brendan Cully, Ashraf Aboulnaga, Kenneth Salem, and Andrew Warfield.
  RemusDB: Transparent High Availability for Database Systems.
  Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (PVLDB), volume 4, number 11, pages 738-748, August 2011.
  Presented at the International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB '11), Seattle, Washington, USA, August 2011.
  Publisher's version
  (Best Paper Award)
• Mumtaz Ahmad, Ashraf Aboulnaga, Shivnath Babu, and Kamesh Munagala.
  Interaction-Aware Scheduling of Report Generation Workloads.
  The VLDB Journal (VLDBJ), volume 20, number 4, pages 589-615, August 2011.
  Publisher's version
  • Extended version of CIKM '08 paper and ICDE '08 poster.
• Ahmed A. Soror, Umar Farooq Minhas, Ashraf Aboulnaga, Kenneth Salem, Peter Kokosielis, and Sunil Kamath.
  Automatic Virtual Machine Configuration for Database Workloads.
  ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS), volume 35, number 1, article 7 (47 pages), February 2010.
  Publisher's version
  • Extended version of SIGMOD '08 paper. Special issue for the best papers of SIGMOD '08.
• Ashraf Aboulnaga and Walid G. Aref.
  Window Query Processing in Linear Quadtrees.
  Distributed and Parallel Databases, volume 10, number 2, pages 111-126, September 2001.
  Publisher's version

Conference and Workshop Papers

• Talha Tahmid, Humera Sabir, and Ashraf Aboulnaga.
  From Transport to Grounding: Designing MCP Connectors for Reliable SPARQL Querying by LLMs.
  International Workshop on Tabular Data Analysis (TaDA '26), Boston, Massachusetts, USA, September 2026.
  Publisher's version
• Waleed Afandi, Hussein Abdallah, Ashraf Aboulnaga, and Essam Mansour.
  An LLM-Guided Query-Aware Inference System for GNN Models on Large Knowledge Graphs.
  IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE '26), Montreal, Canada, pages 1675-1688, May 2026.
  Publisher's version
• Fahim Shahriar Khan and Ashraf Aboulnaga.
  A Vision for SQL-Based Relational Deep Learning.
  International Workshop on Tabular Data Analysis (TaDA '25), London, United Kingdom, 11 pages, September 2025.
  Publisher's version
• Chaoyi Ruan, Yingqiang Zhang, Chao Bi, Xiaosong Ma, Hao Chen, Feifei Li, Cheng Li, Ashraf Aboulnaga, and Xinjun Yang, Yinlong Xu.
  Persistent Memory Disaggregation for Cloud-Native Relational Databases.
  Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS '23), Volume 3, Vancouver, Canada, pages 498-512, March 2023.
  Publisher's version
• Ghadeer Abuoda, Saravanan Thirumuruganathan, and Ashraf Aboulnaga.
  Accelerating Entity Lookups in Knowledge Graphs Through Embeddings.
  IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE '22), Virtual Conference, pages 1111-1123, May 2022.
  Publisher's version
• Aisha Mohamed, Shameem A. Parambath, Zoi Kaoudi, and Ashraf Aboulnaga.
  Popularity Agnostic Evaluation of Knowledge Graph Embeddings.
  Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI '20), Virtual Conference, pages 1059-1068, August 2020.
  Publisher's version
• Xiangyao Yu, Matt Youill, Matthew E. Woicik, Abdurrahman Ghanem, Marco Serafini, Ashraf Aboulnaga, and Michael Stonebraker.
  PushdownDB: Accelerating a DBMS Using S3 Computation.
  IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE '20), Virtual Conference, pages 1802-1805, April 2020.
  Publisher's version
  (Poster)
• Xiongchao Tang, Haojie Wang, Xiaosong Ma, Nosayba El-Sayed, Jidong Zhai, Wenguang Chen, and Ashraf Aboulnaga.
  Spread-n-share: Improving Application Performance and Cluster Throughput with Resource-aware Job Placement.
  International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC '19), Denver, Colorado, USA, pages 12:1-15, November 2019.
  Publisher's version
• Ghadeer Abuoda, Gianmarco De Francisci Morales, and Ashraf Aboulnaga.
  Link Prediction via Higher-Order Motif Features.
  European Conference on Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML/PKDD '19), Würzburg, Germany, pages 412-429, September, 2019.
  Publisher's version
• Rebecca Taft, Nosayba El-Sayed, Marco Serafini, Yu Lu, Ashraf Aboulnaga, Michael Stonebraker, Ricardo Mayerhofer, and Francisco Andrade.
  P-Store: An Elastic Database System with Predictive Provisioning.
  ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD '18), Houston, Texas, USA, pages 205-219, June 2018.
  Publisher's version
• Ahmed El-Roby and Ashraf Aboulnaga.
  UFeed: Refining Web Data Integration Based on User Feedback.
  ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM '17), Singapore, pages 187-196, November 2017.
  Publisher's version
• Ibrahim Abdelaziz, Essam Mansour, Mourad Ouzzani, Ashraf Aboulnaga, and Panos Kalnis.
  Query Optimizations Over Decentralized RDF Graphs.
  IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE '17), San Diego, California, USA, pages 139-142, April 2017.
  Publisher's version
  (Poster)
  • This work was demonstrated at SIGMOD '17.
• Michael J. Mior, Kenneth Salem, Ashraf Aboulnaga, and Rui Liu.
  NoSE: Schema Design for NoSQL Applications.
  IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE '16), Helsinki, Finland, pages 181-192, May 2016.
  Publisher's version
• Carlos H. C. Teixeira, Alexandre J. Fonseca, Marco Serafini, Georgos Siganos, Mohammed J. Zaki, and Ashraf Aboulnaga.
  Arabesque: A System for Distributed Graph Mining.
  Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP '15), Monterey, California, USA, pages 425-440, October 2015.
  Publisher's version
  • This work was demonstrated at SIGMOD '17.
• Jaemyung Kim, Kenneth Salem, Khuzaima Daudjee, Ashraf Aboulnaga, and Xin Pan.
  Database High Availability Using SHADOW Systems.
  ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SoCC '15), Kohala Coast, Hawaii, USA, pages 209-221, August 2015.
  Publisher's version
  (Best Paper Award)
• Tarek Elgamal, Maysam Yabandeh, Ashraf Aboulnaga, Waleed Mustafa, and Mohamed Hefeeda.
  sPCA: Scalable Principal Component Analysis for Big Data on Distributed Platforms.
  ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD '15), Melbourne, Australia, pages 79-91, June 2015.
  Publisher's version
• Ahmed El-Roby and Ashraf Aboulnaga.
  ALEX: Automatic Link Exploration in Linked Data.
  ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD '15), Melbourne, Australia, pages 1839-1853, June 2015.
  Publisher's version
  • This work was demonstrated at ICDE '16.
• Jingen Xiang, Huangdong Meng, and Ashraf Aboulnaga.
  Scalable Matrix Inversion Using MapReduce.
  International Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing (HPDC '14), Vancouver, Canada, pages 177-190, June 2014.
  Publisher's version
• Mostafa Ead, Herodotos Herodotou, Ashraf Aboulnaga, and Shivnath Babu.
  PStorM: Profile Storage and Matching for Feedback-Based Tuning of MapReduce Jobs.
  International Conference on Extending Database Technology (EDBT '14), Athens, Greece, pages 1-12, March 2014.
  Publisher's version
• Farhana H. Zulkernine, Patrick Martin, Ying Zou, Michael Bauer, Femida Gwadry-Sridhar, and Ashraf Aboulnaga.
  Towards Cloud-Based Analytics-as-a-Service (CLAaaS) for Big Data Analytics in the Cloud.
  IEEE International Congress on Big Data, Santa Clara, California, USA, pages 62-69, June 2013.
  Publisher's version
• Jingen Xiang, Cong Guo, and Ashraf Aboulnaga.
  Scalable Maximum Clique Computation Using MapReduce.
  IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE '13), Brisbane, Australia, pages 74-85, April 2013.
  Publisher's version
• Umar Farooq Minhas, Rui Liu, Ashraf Aboulnaga, Kenneth Salem, Jonathan Ng, and Sean Robertson.
  Elastic Scale-out for Partition-Based Database Systems.
  International Workshop on Self-Managing Database Systems (SMDB '12), Washington, DC, USA, April 2012.
  Publisher's version
• Muhammad Bilal Sheikh, Umar Farooq Minhas, Omar Zia Khan, Ashraf Aboulnaga, Pascal Poupart, and David J. Taylor.
  A Bayesian Approach to Online Performance Modeling for Database Appliances using Gaussian Models.
  International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC '11), Karlsruhe, Germany, pages 121-130, June 2011.
  Publisher's version
• Mumtaz Ahmad, Songyun Duan, Ashraf Aboulnaga, and Shivnath Babu.
  Predicting Completion Times of Batch Query Workloads Using Interaction-aware Models and Simulation.
  International Conference on Extending Database Technology (EDBT '11), Uppsala, Sweden, pages 449-460, March 2011.
  Publisher's version
  • Extended version of ICDE '10 short paper.
• Hatem A. Mahmoud and Ashraf Aboulnaga.
  Schema Clustering and Retrieval for Multi-domain Pay-As-You-Go Data Integration Systems.
  ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD '10), Indianapolis, Indiana, USA, pages 411-422, June 2010.
  Publisher's version
• Mumtaz Ahmad, Songyun Duan, Ashraf Aboulnaga, and Shivnath Babu.
  Interaction-Aware Prediction of Business Intelligence Workload Completion Times.
  IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE '10), Long Beach, California, USA, pages 413-416, March 2010.
  Publisher's version
  (Short paper)
• Sean Tozer, Tim Brecht, and Ashraf Aboulnaga.
  Q-Cop: Avoiding Bad Query Mixes to Minimize Client Timeouts Under Heavy Loads.
  IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE '10), Long Beach, California, USA, pages 397-408, March 2010.
  Publisher's version
• Ashraf Aboulnaga, Ziyu Wang, and Zi Ye Zhang.
  Packing the Most Onto Your Cloud.
  International Workshop on Cloud Data Management (CloudDB '09), Hong Kong, China, pages 25-28, November 2009.
  Publisher's version
  (Short paper)
• Iman Elghandour, Ashraf Aboulnaga, Daniel C. Zilio, and Calisto Zuzarte.
  Recommending XMLTable Views for XQuery Workloads.
  International XML Database Symposium (XSym '09), Lyon, France, pages 129-144, August 2009.
  Publisher's version
• Chen Zhang, Hans De Sterck, Ashraf Aboulnaga, Haig Djambazian, and Robert Sladek.
  Case Study of Scientific Data Processing on a Cloud Using Hadoop.
  International Symposium on High Performance Computing Systems and Applications (HPCS '09), Kingston, Ontario, Canada, pages 400-415, June 2009.
  Publisher's version
• Mumtaz Ahmad, Ashraf Aboulnaga, and Shivnath Babu.
  Query Interactions in Database Workloads.
  International Workshop on Testing Database Systems (DBTest '09), Providence, Rhode Island, USA, article 11 (6 pages), June 2009.
  Publisher's version
• Xin Liu, Ashraf Aboulnaga, Kenneth Salem, and Xuhui Li.
  CLIC: CLient-Informed Caching for Storage Servers.
  USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST '09), San Francisco, California, USA, pages 297-310, February 2009.
  Publisher's version
• Mumtaz Ahmad, Ashraf Aboulnaga, Shivnath Babu, and Kamesh Munagala.
  Modeling and Exploiting Query Interactions in Database Systems.
  ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM '08), Napa, California, USA, pages 183-192, October 2008.
  Publisher's version
• Ahmed Ataullah, Ashraf Aboulnaga, and Frank Wm. Tompa.
  Records Retention in Relational Database Systems.
  ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM '08), Napa, California, USA, pages 873-882, October 2008.
  Publisher's version
• Ahmed A. Soror, Umar Farooq Minhas, Ashraf Aboulnaga, Kenneth Salem, Peter Kokosielis, and Sunil Kamath.
  Automatic Virtual Machine Configuration for Database Workloads.
  ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD '08), Vancouver, Canada, pages 953-966, June 2008.
  Publisher's version
• Iman Elghandour, Ashraf Aboulnaga, Daniel C. Zilio, Fei Chiang, Andrey Balmin, Kevin Beyer, and Calisto Zuzarte.
  XML Index Recommendation with Tight Optimizer Coupling.
  IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE '08), Cancun, Mexico, pages 833-842, April 2008.
  Publisher's version
  • This work was demonstrated at SIGMOD '08.
  • The XML Index Advisor described in this paper works with IBM DB2 V9.5 and higher, and is available for download from IBM's website.
• Mumtaz Ahmad, Ashraf Aboulnaga, Shivnath Babu, and Kamesh Munagala.
  QShuffler: Getting the Query Mix Right.
  IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE '08), Cancun, Mexico, pages 1415-1417, April 2008.
  Publisher's version
  (Poster)
• Umar Farooq Minhas, Jitendra Yadav, Ashraf Aboulnaga, and Kenneth Salem.
  Database Systems on Virtual Machines: How Much do You Lose?
  International Workshop on Self-Managing Database Systems (SMDB '08), Cancun, Mexico, pages 35-41, April 2008.
  Publisher's version
• Kareem El Gebaly and Ashraf Aboulnaga.
  Robustness in Automatic Physical Database Design.
  International Conference on Extending Database Technology (EDBT '08), Nantes, France, pages 145-156, March 2008.
  Publisher's version
• Ashraf Aboulnaga and Kareem El Gebaly.
  μBE: User Guided Source Selection and Schema Mediation for Internet Scale Data Integration.
  IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE '07), Istanbul, Turkey, pages 186-195, April 2007.
  Publisher's version
  • This work was demonstrated at ICDE '07.
• Ahmed A. Soror, Ashraf Aboulnaga, and Kenneth Salem.
  Database Virtualization: A New Frontier for Database Tuning and Physical Design.
  Workshop on Self-Managing Database Systems (SMDB '07), Istanbul, Turkey, pages 388-394, April 2007.
  Publisher's version
• Ning Zhang, M. Tamer Özsu, Ihab F. Ilyas, and Ashraf Aboulnaga.
  FIX: Feature-based Indexing Techniques for XML Documents.
  International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB '06), Seoul, Korea, pages 259-270, September 2006.
  Publisher's version
• Ning Zhang, M. Tamer Özsu, Ashraf Aboulnaga, and Ihab F. Ilyas.
  XSeed: Accurate and Fast Cardinality Estimation for XPath Queries.
  IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE '06), Atlanta, Georgia, USA, pages 61-72, April 2006.
  Publisher's version
• Xuhui Li, Ashraf Aboulnaga, Kenneth Salem, Aamer Sachedina, and Shaobo Gao.
  Second-Tier Cache Management Using Write Hints.
  USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST '05), San Francisco, California, USA, pages 115-128, December 2005.
  Publisher's version
• Ashraf Aboulnaga, Peter J. Haas, Mokhtar Kandil, Sam Lightstone, Guy M. Lohman, Volker Markl, Ivan Popivanov, and Vijayshankar Raman.
  Automated Statistics Collection in DB2 UDB.
  International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB '04), Toronto, Canada, pages 1146-1157, August 2004.
  Publisher's version
  • This technology is included in DB2 for Linux, Unix, and Windows since V8.2.
• Ihab F. Ilyas, Volker Markl, Peter J. Haas, Paul Brown, and Ashraf Aboulnaga.
  CORDS: Automatic Discovery of Correlations and Soft Functional Dependencies.
  ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, Paris, France, pages 647-658, June 2004.
  Publisher's version
  • This work was demonstrated at VLDB '04.
• Ihab F. Ilyas, Peter J. Haas, Volker Markl, Paul Brown, and Ashraf Aboulnaga.
  Automatic Relationship Discovery in Self-Managing Database Systems.
  International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC '04), New York, New York, USA, pages 340-341, May 2004.
  Publisher's version
  (Poster)
• Ashraf Aboulnaga and Jeffrey F. Naughton.
  Building XML Statistics for the Hidden Web.
  ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM '03), New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, pages 358-365, November 2003.
  Publisher's version
• Ashraf Aboulnaga, Alaa R. Alameldeen, and Jeffrey F. Naughton.
  Estimating the Selectivity of XML Path Expressions for Internet Scale Applications.
  International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB '01), Rome, Italy, pages 591-600, September 2001.
  Publisher's version
• Ashraf Aboulnaga, Jeffrey F. Naughton, and Chun Zhang.
  Generating Synthetic Complex-structured XML Data.
  Fourth International Workshop on the Web and Databases (WebDB '01), Santa Barbara, California, USA, pages 79-84, May 2001.
  • Data generator available for download here.
• Ashraf Aboulnaga and Jeffrey F. Naughton.
  Accurate Estimation of the Cost of Spatial Selections.
  IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE '00), San Diego, California, USA, pages 123-134, February 2000.
  Publisher's version
• Ashraf Aboulnaga and Surajit Chaudhuri.
  Self-tuning Histograms: Building Histograms Without Looking at Data.
  ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA pages 181-192, June 1999.
  Publisher's version

System Demonstrations

• Aisha Mohamed, Ghadeer Abuoda, Abdurrahman Ghanem, Zoi Kaoudi, and Ashraf Aboulnaga.
  RDFFrames: Knowledge Graph Access for Machine Learning Tools.
  Demonstration at the International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB '20), Virtual Conference, in Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (PVLDB), volume 13, number 12, pages 2889-2892, August 2020.
  Publisher's version
  • Demonstration of work that appears in VLDBJ '21.
• Essam Mansour, Ibrahim Abdelaziz, Mourad Ouzzani, Ashraf Aboulnaga, and Panos Kalnis.
  A Demonstration of Lusail: Querying Linked Data at Scale.
  Demonstration at the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD '17), Chicago, Illinois, USA, pages 1603-1606, May 2017.
  Publisher's version
  • Demonstration of work that appears in VLDB '18 and ICDE '17.
• Eslam Hussein, Abdurrahman Ghanem, Vinícius Vitor dos Santos Dias, Carlos H. C. Teixeira, Ghadeer Abuoda, Marco Serafini, Georgos Siganos, Gianmarco De Francisci Morales, Ashraf Aboulnaga, and Mohammed J. Zaki.
  Graph Data Mining with Arabesque.
  Demonstration at the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD '17), Chicago, Illinois, USA, pages 1647-1650, May 2017.
  Publisher's version
  (Best Demonstration Award, Honorable Mention)
  • Demonstration of work that appears in SOSP '15.
• Ahmed El-Roby, Khaled Ammar, Ashraf Aboulnaga, and Jimmy Lin.
  Sapphire: Querying RDF Data Made Simple.
  Demonstration at the International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB '16), New Delhi, India, in Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (PVLDB), volume 9, number 13, pages 1481-1484, September 2016.
  Publisher's version
• Ahmed El-Roby and Ashraf Aboulnaga.
  ALEX: Automatic Link Exploration in Linked Data.
  Demonstration at the IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE '16), Helsinki, Finland, pages 1322-1325, May 2016.
  Publisher's version
  • Demonstration of work that appears in SIGMOD '15.
• Essam Mansour, Andrei Vlad Sambra, Sandro Hawke, Maged Zereba, Sarven Capadisli, Abdurrahman Ghanem, Ashraf Aboulnaga, and Tim Berners-Lee.
  A Demonstration of the Solid Platform for Social Web Applications.
  Demonstration at the International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW '16), Montreal, Canada, pages 223-226, April 2016.
  Publisher's version
• Andrei Sambra, Sandro Hawke, Tim Berners-Lee, Lalana Kagal, and Ashraf Aboulnaga.
  CIMBA - Client-Integrated MicroBlogging Architecture.
  Demonstration at the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC '14), Riva del Garda, Italy, pages 57-60, October 2014.
  Publisher's version
• Iman Elghandour and Ashraf Aboulnaga.
  ReStore: Reusing Results of MapReduce Jobs in Pig.
  Demonstration at the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD '12), Scottsdale, Arizona, USA, pages 701-704, May 2012.
  Publisher's version
  • Demonstration of work that appears in PVLDB '12.
• Iman Elghandour, Ashraf Aboulnaga, Daniel C. Zilio, Fei Chiang, Andrey Balmin, Kevin Beyer, and Calisto Zuzarte.
  An XML Index Advisor for DB2.
  Demonstration at the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD '08), Vancouver, Canada, pages 1267-1270, June 2008.
  Publisher's version
  • Demonstration of work that appears in ICDE '08.
• Ashraf Aboulnaga, Kareem El Gebaly, and Daniel Wong.
  μBE: User Guided Source Selection and Schema Mediation for Internet Scale Data Integration.
  Demonstration at the IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE '07), Istanbul, Turkey, pages 1513-1514, April 2007.
  Publisher's version
  • Demonstration of work that appears in ICDE '07.
• Ihab F. Ilyas, Volker Markl, Peter J. Haas, Paul Brown, and Ashraf Aboulnaga.
  CORDS: Automatic Generation of Correlation Statistics in DB2.
  Demonstration at the International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB '04), Toronto, Canada, pages 1341-1344, August 2004.
  Publisher's version
  • Demonstration of work that appears in SIGMOD '04.

Tutorials

• Ashraf Aboulnaga and Shivnath Babu.
  Workload Management for Big Data Analytics. (Slides)
  Tutorial at the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD '13), New York, New York, USA, pages 929-932, June 2013.
  Publisher's version
• Ashraf Aboulnaga and Shivnath Babu.
  Workload Management for Big Data Analytics. (Slides)
  Advanced technology seminar at the IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE '13), Brisbane, Australia, page 1249, April 2013.
  Publisher's version
• Ashraf Aboulnaga, Cristiana Amza, and Kenneth Salem.
  Virtualization and Databases: State of the Art and Research Challenges.
  Tutorial at the International Conference on Extending Database Technology (EDBT '08), Nantes, France, pages 746-747, March 2008.
  Publisher's version
• Ashraf Aboulnaga, Cristiana Amza, and Kenneth Salem.
  Virtualization and Databases: State of the Art and Research Challenges.
  Advanced technology seminar at the IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE '07), Istanbul, Turkey, April 2007.

Other Papers

• Ashraf Aboulnaga, Azza Abouzied, Karima Echihabi, and Mourad Ouzzani.
  Database Systems Research in the Arab World: A Tradition that Spans Decades.
  Communications of the ACM, volume 64, number 4, page2 120-123, April 2021.
  Publisher's version
  (Invited)
  • Special section on computing in the Arab World.
• Ashraf Aboulnaga, Mohammed Al-Mannai, Hassan Al-Sayed, Sanjay Chawla, Ahmed Elmagarmid,
  An AI-enabled Future for Qatar and the Region.
  Communications of the ACM, volume 64, number 4, page2 59-61, April 2021.
  Publisher's version
  (Invited)
  • Special section on computing in the Arab World.
• Ashraf Aboulnaga.
  Guest Editorial for Special Issue on the Best Papers of DaMoN 2019.
  The VLDB Journal (VLDBJ), volume 29, number 6, page 1221, November 2020.
  Publisher's version
• Ashraf Aboulnaga, Beng Chin Ooi, and Patrick Valduriez.
  Guest Editorial for Special Section on Data-Intensive Cloud Infrastructure.
  The VLDB Journal (VLDBJ), volume 23, number 6, page 843, December 2014.
  Publisher's version
• Ashraf Aboulnaga and Carlo Curino.
  Report on the Second International Workshop on Data Management in the Cloud (DMC 2013).
  IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin, volume 36, number 2, pages 2-4, June 2013.
  Publisher's version
  (Invited)
• Ashraf Aboulnaga and Chee Yong Chan.
  Letter from the Guest Editors.
  Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (PVLDB), volume 6, number 4, page x, February 2013.
• Ashraf Aboulnaga and Kenneth Salem.
  Report on the Fourth International Workshop on Self-Managing Database Systems (SMDB 2009).
  IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin, volume 32, number 4, pages 2-5, December 2009.
  Publisher's version
  (Invited)
• Ashraf Aboulnaga, Kenneth Salem, Ahmed A. Soror, Umar Farooq Minhas, Peter Kokosielis, and Sunil Kamath.
  Deploying Database Appliances in the Cloud.
  IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin, volume 32, number 1, pages 13-20, March 2009.
  Publisher's version
  (Invited)
• Jeffrey F. Naughton, David J. DeWitt, David Maier, Ashraf Aboulnaga, Jianjun Chen, Leonidas Galanis, Jaewoo Kang, Rajasekar Krishnamurthy, Qiong Luo, Naveen Prakash, Ravishankar Ramamurthy, Jayavel Shanmugasundaram, Feng Tian, Kristin Tufte, Stratis Viglas, Yuan Wang, Chun Zhang, Bruce Jackson, Anurag Gupta, and Rushan Chen.
  The Niagara Internet Query System.
  IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin, volume 24, number 2, pages 27-33, June 2001.
  Publisher's version
  (Invited)

Technical Reports

• Fahim Shahriar Khan and Ashraf Aboulnaga.
  MetaSieve: Faster Relational Deep Learning through SQL-Based Metapath Selection.
  Technical Report arXiv:2608.25903, Computing Research Repository (CoRR), August 2026.
  Publisher's version
  • Not otherwise published.
• Waleed Afandi, Hussein Abdallah, Ashraf Aboulnaga, and Essam Mansour.
  An LLM-Guided Query-Aware Inference System for GNN Models on Large Knowledge Graphs.
  Technical Report arXiv:2603.04545, Computing Research Repository (CoRR), March 2026.
  Publisher's version
  • Extended version of ICDE '26 paper.
• Humera Sabir, Fatima Farooq, and Ashraf Aboulnaga.
  gHAWK: Local and Global Structure Encoding for Scalable Training of Graph Neural Networks on Knowledge Graphs.
  Technical Report arXiv:2512.08274, Computing Research Repository (CoRR), December 2025.
  Publisher's version
  • Not otherwise published.
• Yifei Yang, Xiangyao Yu, Marco Serafini, Ashraf Aboulnaga, and Michael Stonebraker.
  Enhancing Computation Pushdown for Cloud OLAP Databases.
  Technical Report arXiv:2312.15405, Computing Research Repository (CoRR), December 2023.
  Publisher's version
  • Extended version of VLDBJ '24 paper.
• Xiangyao Yu, Matt Youill, Matthew E. Woicik, Abdurrahman Ghanem, Marco Serafini, Ashraf Aboulnaga, and Michael Stonebraker.
  PushdownDB: Accelerating a DBMS using S3 Computation.
  Technical Report arXiv:2002.05837, Computing Research Repository (CoRR), February 2020.
  Publisher's version
  • Extended version of ICDE '20 paper.
• Aisha Mohamed, Ghadeer Abuoda, Abdurrahman Ghanem, Zoi Kaoudi, and Ashraf Aboulnaga.
  RDFFrames: Knowledge Graph Access for Machine Learning Tools.
  Technical Report arXiv:2002.03614, Computing Research Repository (CoRR), February 2020.
  Publisher's version
  • Extended version of VLDBJ '21 paper.
• Xiaowei Zhu, Guanyu Feng, Marco Serafini, Xiaosong Ma, Jiping Yu, Lei Xie, Ashraf Aboulnaga, and Wenguang Chen.
  LiveGraph: A Transactional Graph Storage System with Purely Sequential Adjacency List Scans.
  Technical Report arXiv:1910.05773, Computing Research Repository (CoRR), October 2019.
  Publisher's version
  • Extended version of PVLDB '20 paper.
• Ghadeer Abuoda, Gianmarco De Francisci Morales, and Ashraf Aboulnaga.
  Link Prediction via Higher-Order Motif Features.
  Technical Report arXiv:1902.06679, Computing Research Repository (CoRR), February 2019.
  Publisher's version
  • Extended version of ECML/PKDD '19 paper.
• Ahmed El-Roby, Khaled Ammar, Ashraf Aboulnaga, and Jimmy Lin.
  Sapphire: Querying RDF Data Made Simple.
  Technical Report arXiv:1805.11728, Computing Research Repository (CoRR), May 2018.
  Publisher's version
  • Extended version of VLDB '16 demo.
• Michael J. Mior, Kenneth Salem, Ashraf Aboulnaga, and Rui Liu.
  NoSE: Schema Design for NoSQL Applications.
  Technical Report CS-2015-17, Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, October 2015.
  Publisher's version
  • Extended version of ICDE '16 paper.
• Carlos H.C. Teixeira, Alexandre J. Fonseca, Marco Serafini, Georgios Siganos, Mohammed J. Zaki, and Ashraf Aboulnaga.
  Arabesque: A System for Distributed Graph Pattern Mining.
  Technical Report arXiv:1510.04233, Computing Research Repository (CoRR), October 2015.
  Publisher's version
  • Extended version of SOSP '15 paper.
• Muhammad Bilal Sheikh, Umar Farooq Minhas, Omar Zia Khan, Ashraf Aboulnaga, Pascal Poupart, and David J. Taylor.
  A Bayesian Approach to Online Performance Modeling for Database Appliances using Gaussian Models.
  Technical Report CS-2011-13, Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, December 2011.
  Publisher's version
  • Extended version of ICAC '11 paper.
• Mumtaz Ahmad, Ashraf Aboulnaga, Shivnath Babu, and Kamesh Munagala.
  Interaction-Aware Scheduling of Report Generation Workloads.
  Technical Report CS-2010-22, Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, December 2010.
  Publisher's version
  • Extended version of VLDBJ '11 paper.
• Iman Elghandour, Ashraf Aboulnaga, Daniel C. Zilio, Fei Chiang, Andrey Balmin, Kevin Beyer, and Calisto Zuzarte.
  XML Index Recommendation with Tight Optimizer Coupling.
  Technical Report CS-2007-22, Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, July 2007.
  Publisher's version
  • Extended version of ICDE '08 paper.
• Ashraf Aboulnaga and Jeffrey F. Naughton.
  Towards Building XML Statistics for the Hidden Web.
  Technical Report TR-CS-03-1477, Computer Sciences Department, University of Wisconsin - Madison, April 2003.
  Publisher's version
  • Extended version of CIKM '03 paper.
• Ashraf Aboulnaga and Surajit Chaudhuri.
  Accurate Query Optimization by Sub-plan Memoization.
  Technical Report MSR-TR-1999-102, Microsoft Research, December 1999.
  Publisher's version
  • Not otherwise published.

Patents

• Ashraf Aboulnaga, Andrey Balmin, Kevin Beyer, Iman Elghandour, Fei Chiang, Daniel C. Zilio, and Calisto Zuzarte.
  Index Selection for XML Database Systems.
  US Patent No. 8,229,920, filed August 2007, issued July 2012.
• Volker Markl, Peter J. Haas, Ashraf Aboulnaga, Vijayashankar Raman, and Felix Endres.
  System and Method for Updating Database Statistics According to Query Feedback.
  US Patent No. 7,831,592, filed October 2004, issued November 2010.
• Ashraf Aboulnaga, Peter J. Haas, Sam Lightstone, Volker Markl, Ivan Popivanov, and Vijayshankar Raman.
  Method, System and Program for Prioritizing Maintenance of Database Tables.
  US Patent No. 7,363,324, filed December 2004, issued April 2008.
• Surajit Chaudhuri and Ashraf Aboulnaga.
  Query Optimization by Sub-plan Memoization.
  US Patent No. 6,850,925, filed May 2001, issued February 2005.
• Ashraf Aboulnaga and Surajit Chaudhuri.
  Self-tuning Histogram and Database Modeling.
  US Patent No. 6,460,045, filed March 1999, issued October 2002.

Theses

• Ashraf Aboulnaga.
  Cost Estimation Techniques for Database Systems.
  Ph.D. Thesis, University of Wisconsin - Madison, 2002.
• Ashraf Aboulnaga.
  An Algorithm and a Cost Model for Window Queries in Spatial Databases.
  M.S. Thesis, Alexandria University, Egypt, 1996.