Keynote Talk
"Future Query Languages"
Abstract: Database query languages are perhaps the greatest success story of declarative programming languages. By separating intent from execution, declarative languages allow agents or programmers to focus on getting the correct results instead of writing efficient programs to obtain them. However, today’s query languages are data sublanguages: they focus on storage and retrieval of data from databases. The aim of this talk is to explore how query languages can evolve into full-fledged programming languages, which is in line with Jim Gray’s dream of automatic programming. This talk has two main goals. First, I want to draw our attention to the goal of automatic programming, i.e., expanding the scope of query languages to full-fledges programming languages. Second, I will argue how we need to revisit some basic principles of query languages if we want to achieve this goal, notably nulls and bag semantics. My story will be interleaved with some design aspects of Rel, which is an example of how database principles can be used to expand the scope of query languages beyond the sublanguage paradigm. Rel is a language that was developed at RelationalAI and to whose design I contributed.
Biography
Wim Martens is professor for Data Intensive Computing at the University of Bayreuth. He is interested in data management (with a current focus on query language design and graph databases), logic, complexity, and formal language theory. One of his goals is to find a good balance for making programming with data easy, intuitive, precise, and efficient.
He was an invited speaker at STOC 2017 and PODS 2022, and his research received several awards (e.g., SIGMOD Best Industry Paper, five SIGMOD research highlight awards, a CACM research highlights award, an ICDT best paper and Test-of-Time award, and the Belgian dissertation award for computer science). He was PC chair of PODS and ICDT, and acted as program committee member in major conferences in databases, the Web, theoretical computer science, and logic, such as SIGMOD, PODS, ICDE, ICDT, WWW, ICALP, STACS, and LICS. Currently, he is on the editorial boards of ACM Transactions on Database Systems and Transactions on Graph Data and Knowledge, and the advisory board of TheoretiCS. In the past, he chaired the ICDT Council.