GQL and SQL/PGQ: Theoretical Models and Expressive Power

Summary: Introduce Core PGQ and Core GQL formal models capturing SQL/PGQ vs GQL and contrasting PGQ's bottom-up with GQL's pipelined evaluation. Theoretically pinpoint expressiveness gaps that necessitate language extensions and empirically show standard workarounds are impractical. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 13838
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2025
Pagerank: 4.6712228e-05
Overall Rank: 7,713 | 46.35%
DOI: 10.14778/3725688.3725707

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 5 of 5 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
9,997	Raqlet: Cross-Paradigm Compilation for Recursive Queries	2026	CIDR	4.1945683e-05
10,006	On the Expressiveness of Languages for Querying Property Graphs in Relational Databases	2026	PODS	4.1945683e-05
10,477	Dangers of List Processing in Querying Property Graphs	2025	SIGMOD	4.1945683e-05
10,839	Property Graph Standards: State of the Art & Open Challenges	2025	VLDB	4.1945683e-05
10,845	Versatile Property Graph Transformations	2025	VLDB	4.1945683e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 12 of 12 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
256	GraphLog: a Visual Formalism for Real Life Recursion	1990	PODS	0.00030259041
363	A Graphical Query Language Supporting Recursion	1987	SIGMOD	0.00025715157
789	Cypher: An Evolving Query Language for Property Graphs	2018	SIGMOD	0.00016634256
1,037	Querying Graph Databases	2013	PODS	0.00014502493
1,812	Expressive Languages for Path Queries over Graph-Structured Data	2010	PODS	0.00010467069
2,130	SQLGraph: An Efficient Relational-Based Property Graph Store	2015	SIGMOD	9.4798556e-05
2,505	Graph Pattern Matching in GQL and SQL/PGQ	2022	SIGMOD	8.634551e-05
4,198	Aggregation Support for Modern Graph Analytics in TigerGraph	2020	SIGMOD	6.3677305e-05
5,012	SQL Has Problems. We Can Fix Them: Pipe Syntax In SQL	2024	VLDB	5.7599595e-05
5,651	GPC: A Pattern Calculus for Property Graphs	2023	PODS	5.3905536e-05
5,659	Implementation Strategies for Views over Property Graphs	2024	SIGMOD	5.3847762e-05
7,033	DuckPGQ: Bringing SQL/PGQ to DuckDB	2023	VLDB	4.8551607e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
9,739	Expressive Languages for Querying the Semantic Web	2014	PODS	4.2936538e-05
9,280	A Theory of Regular Queries	2016	PODS	4.3636639e-05
9,969	Semantic Data Modeling, Graph Query, and SQL, Together at Last?	2026	CIDR	4.1945683e-05
12,092	Efficient Implementation of Generalized Quantification in Relational Query Languages	2013	VLDB	4.1945683e-05
1,785	PG-Schema: Schemas for Property Graphs	2023	SIGMOD	0.00010560236
1,037	Querying Graph Databases	2013	PODS	0.00014502493
2,505	Graph Pattern Matching in GQL and SQL/PGQ	2022	SIGMOD	8.634551e-05
9,535	Graph Data Models, Query Languages and Programming Paradigms	2018	VLDB	4.3265843e-05
5,651	GPC: A Pattern Calculus for Property Graphs	2023	PODS	5.3905536e-05
10,006	On the Expressiveness of Languages for Querying Property Graphs in Relational Databases	2026	PODS	4.1945683e-05