Beyond Relations: A Case for Elevating to the Entity-Relationship Abstraction

Summary: Argues RDBMSs must elevate the entity-relationship (ER) abstraction beyond object-relational to restore logical data independence and enable higher-level innovation instead of acting as mere storage. Presents ErbiumDB prototype exploring ER-first internals and key research challenges: mapping, optimization, evolution, and tooling. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 540
Venue: CIDR
Year: 2025
Pagerank: 6.1790655e-05
Overall Rank: 5,547 | 61.95%
DOI: -

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Amol Deshpande (University of Maryland)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{deshpande_cidr25,
        address = {Amsterdam, Netherlands},
        series = {{CIDR} '25},
        title = {{Beyond Relations: A Case for Elevating to the Entity-Relationship Abstraction}},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {Conference} on {Innovative} {Data} {Systems} {Research}},
        author = {Deshpande, Amol},
        year = {2025}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 3 of 3 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
10,117	Semantic Data Modeling, Graph Query, and SQL, Together at Last?	2026	CIDR	5.093636e-05
10,133	Database Research needs an Abstract Relational Query Language	2026	CIDR	5.093636e-05
10,995	Towards Principled, Practical Document Database Design	2025	VLDB	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 21 of 21 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
10	Extending the Data Base Relational Model to Capture More Meaning	1979	SIGMOD	0.0007727299
12	C-Store: A Column-oriented DBMS	2005	VLDB	0.00069513174
92	The Database Language GEM	1983	SIGMOD	0.00034759032
362	Storing and Querying Ordered XML Using a Relational Database System	2002	SIGMOD	0.00020125068
684	A Data Model and Query Language for EXODUS	1988	SIGMOD	0.00014990873
824	The Semantic Data Model: A Modelling Mechanism for Data Base Applications	1978	SIGMOD	0.00013791986
1,275	An Entity-based Database User Interface	1980	SIGMOD	0.00011372804
1,349	Principles of Dataset Versioning: Exploring the Recreation/Storage Tradeoff	2015	VLDB	0.00011069122
1,591	SQLGraph: An Efficient Relational-Based Property Graph Store	2015	SIGMOD	0.00010255536
1,661	PG-Schema: Schemas for Property Graphs	2023	SIGMOD	0.00010079134
2,038	Graceful Database Schema Evolution: the PRISM Workbench	2008	VLDB	9.2727673e-05
2,464	Compiling Mappings to Bridge Applications and Databases	2007	SIGMOD	8.5480977e-05
3,186	Feral Concurrency Control: An Empirical Investigation of Modern Application Integrity	2015	SIGMOD	7.6559187e-05
4,367	SQL Has Problems. We Can Fix Them: Pipe Syntax In SQL	2024	VLDB	6.7395125e-05
4,796	A Critique of Modern SQL And A Proposal Towards A Simple and Expressive Query Language	2024	CIDR	6.5031952e-05
6,377	Scalable Querying of Nested Data	2021	VLDB	5.8931544e-05
7,323	Object/Relational Mapping 2008: Hibernate and the Entity Data Model (EDM)	2008	SIGMOD	5.6445692e-05
7,593	Query Containment in Entity SQL (Extended Abstract)	2013	SIGMOD	5.5893275e-05
7,791	BullFrog: Online Schema Evolution via Lazy Evaluation	2021	SIGMOD	5.5438714e-05
9,663	ADO.NET Entity Framework: Raising the Level of Abstraction in Data Programming	2007	SIGMOD	5.2407566e-05
9,839	Sypse: Privacy-first Data Management through Pseudonymization and Partitioning	2021	CIDR	5.2103651e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	6,263	Database Technology for the Masses: Sub-Operators as First-Class Entities	2021	VLDB
2	4,267	Toward Logical Data Independence: A Relational Query Language without Relations	1982	SIGMOD
3	13,260	A Systematic Approach to Relational Database Theory	1982	SIGMOD
4	3,222	Comprehensive Approach to the Design of Relational Database Schemes	1984	VLDB
5	6,464	Research Directions in Object-Oriented Database Systems	1990	PODS
6	4,951	A Relationship Mechanism for a Strongly Typed Object-Oriented Database Programming Language	1991	VLDB
7	14,546	A Practical Design Methodology for the Implementation of IMS Databases, Using the Entity-Relationship Model	1980	SIGMOD
8	9,109	Incremental Reorganization of Relational Databases	1987	VLDB
9	14,545	Entity-Relationship Approach to the Conceptual Schema Design	1980	SIGMOD
10	181	On Extending the Functions of a Relational Database System	1982	SIGMOD