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.

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 10	Mar 10	Jeff Shute	Pipe Syntax in SQL: SQL for the 21st Century
Mar 17	Mar 17	Lloyd Tabb	Malloy: A Modern Open Source Language for Analyzing, Transforming, and Modeling Data
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 Query Optimizer: A Multi-tool That Does Some Things Differently
Apr 21	Apr 21	Michael Sullivan	Gel: Replacing* SQL and Improving on the Relational Database Model