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: 13839
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2025
Pagerank: 4.6667433e-05
Overall Rank: 7,712 | 46.41%
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
9,996	Raqlet: Cross-Paradigm Compilation for Recursive Queries	2026	CIDR	4.1905499e-05
10,005	On the Expressiveness of Languages for Querying Property Graphs in Relational Databases	2026	PODS	4.1905499e-05
10,487	Dangers of List Processing in Querying Property Graphs	2025	SIGMOD	4.1905499e-05
10,843	Property Graph Standards: State of the Art & Open Challenges	2025	VLDB	4.1905499e-05
10,849	Versatile Property Graph Transformations	2025	VLDB	4.1905499e-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	0.00030241337
364	A Graphical Query Language Supporting Recursion	1987	SIGMOD	0.00025657601
787	Cypher: An Evolving Query Language for Property Graphs	2018	SIGMOD	0.00016624372
1,040	Querying Graph Databases	2013	PODS	0.00014483577
1,812	Expressive Languages for Path Queries over Graph-Structured Data	2010	PODS	0.00010458164
2,128	SQLGraph: An Efficient Relational-Based Property Graph Store	2015	SIGMOD	9.4804485e-05
2,504	Graph Pattern Matching in GQL and SQL/PGQ	2022	SIGMOD	8.629969e-05
4,187	Aggregation Support for Modern Graph Analytics in TigerGraph	2020	SIGMOD	6.3700415e-05
5,011	SQL Has Problems. We Can Fix Them: Pipe Syntax In SQL	2024	VLDB	5.7544221e-05
5,663	GPC: A Pattern Calculus for Property Graphs	2023	PODS	5.3853781e-05
5,672	Implementation Strategies for Views over Property Graphs	2024	SIGMOD	5.3796057e-05
7,021	DuckPGQ: Bringing SQL/PGQ to DuckDB	2023	VLDB	4.8546368e-05

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Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
9,738	Expressive Languages for Querying the Semantic Web	2014	PODS	4.2895392e-05
9,285	A Theory of Regular Queries	2016	PODS	4.3594818e-05
9,968	Semantic Data Modeling, Graph Query, and SQL, Together at Last?	2026	CIDR	4.1905499e-05
1,782	PG-Schema: Schemas for Property Graphs	2023	SIGMOD	0.00010557905
12,100	Efficient Implementation of Generalized Quantification in Relational Query Languages	2013	VLDB	4.1905499e-05
1,040	Querying Graph Databases	2013	PODS	0.00014483577
9,536	Graph Data Models, Query Languages and Programming Paradigms	2018	VLDB	4.3225428e-05
2,504	Graph Pattern Matching in GQL and SQL/PGQ	2022	SIGMOD	8.629969e-05
5,663	GPC: A Pattern Calculus for Property Graphs	2023	PODS	5.3853781e-05
10,005	On the Expressiveness of Languages for Querying Property Graphs in Relational Databases	2026	PODS	4.1905499e-05