News

Our paper Rel: A Programming Language for Relational Data (SIGMOD 2025) was selected for a SIGMOD Research Highlight Award!

The paper is about our (read: a large group of people, coming from academia and industry) design of a declarative programming language for data. The goal is to grow beyond the "sublanguage paradigm" that we have grown accustomed to in databases. Indeed, if we want to solve complex tasks, we usually use general-purpose imperative programs (written in, say, C++, Java, Rust) in which we execute domain-specific declarative programs (usually SQL). This mismatch of paradigms (declarative vs imperative) causes friction that we are trying to alleviate.

You can take a look at

• our SIGMOD Record paper about Rel, which goes deeper into some design decisions than the conference paper
• a very nice technical perspective about Rel, by Viktor Leis and Thomas Neumann from TU Munich