SQL or Death? Seminar Series – Spring 2025
Suppose somebody has been rubbing gasoline on their body since the 1970s. Would you marry that person even if they smelled terrible? But suppose this person starts showering every day so they smell a little better. They also famously get along with nearly everyone on the planet and makes a lot of money. What about marrying this person now? This is the question that we face today in the world of databases. SQL is 50 years old. It started off smelling kind of funny, but it has gotten better over the years. There have been many attempts at replacing it, but none have succeeded.
The Carnegie Mellon University Database Research Group is exploring this question with the SQL or Death? Seminar Series. The talks in this series will present ideas on either (1) making SQL go as fast as possible or (2) replacing SQL with something better.
All talks are on-line and open to the public via Zoom. You do not need to be a current CMU student to attend. Random people off of the internet are especially welcome. Videos will be posted on the CMU-DB YouTube Channel after each talk.
- Time: Mondays @ 4:30pm ET
- Location: Zoom (Must Be Authenticated)
- Organizers: Andy Pavlo, Jignesh Patel, Sam Arch
Schedule
| Date | Speaker | Talk Title | Video | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Feb 10 |
Feb 10 | James Cowling | Larry Ellison was Right (kinda)! TypeScript Stored Procedures for the Modern Age | — |
Feb 17 |
Feb 17 | Viktor Leis, Thomas Neumann | Towards Sanity in Query Languages | — |
Feb 24 |
Feb 24 | Yash Mayya, Gonzalo Ortiz | Apache Pinot Query Optimizer | — |
Mar 3 |
Mar 3 | Lloyd Tabb | Malloy: A Modern Open Source Language for Analyzing, Transforming, and Modeling Data | — |
Mar 10 |
Mar 10 | Jeff Shute | GoogleSQL Pipe Syntax | — |
Mar 24 |
Mar 24 | Tobias Brandt | PRQL: Pipelined Relational Query Language | — |
Mar 31 |
Mar 31 | Kaisen Kang | StarRocks Query Optimizer | — |
Apr 7 |
Apr 7 | Ben Naecker | OxQL: Oximeter Query Language | — |
Apr 14 |
Apr 14 | Michael Widenius | MariaDB’s New Query Optimizer | — |
Apr 21 |
Apr 21 | Michael Sullivan | EdgeQL with EdgeDB | — |
Other Seminars
- SQL or Death? Seminar Series (2025)
- Database Building Blocks Seminar (2024)
- ML⇄DB Seminar Series (2023)
- ¡Databases! - A Database Seminar Series (2022)
- Vaccination Database Talks — Booster (2022)
- Vaccination Database Talks — Second Dose (2021)
- Vaccination Database Talks — First Dose (2021)
- Quarantine Database Tech Talks (2020)
- Hardware Accelerated Database Lectures (2018)
- Time Series Database Lectures (2017)
- The Databaseology Lectures (2015)
- Seven Databases in Seven Weeks (2014)
Sponsors
