Functional-Style SQL UDFs With a Capital 'F'

Summary: Advocates functional-style SQL UDFs using self-invocation for recursion; compiles them to SQL:1999 recursive CTEs. A function-call graph–based compiler enables memoization, reference counting, and linear/tail recursion optimizations to produce fast, readable UDFs that outperform hand-tuned SQL. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 5923
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2020
Pagerank: 4.9734285e-05
Overall Rank: 6,646 | 53.82%
DOI: 10.1145/3318464.3389707

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Christian Duta
2. Torsten Grust

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 9 of 9 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
2,242	Procedural Extensions of SQL: Understanding their usage in the wild	2021	VLDB	9.2124242e-05
3,649	One WITH RECURSIVE is Worth Many GOTOs	2021	SIGMOD	6.8764882e-05
5,741	Babelfish: Efficient Execution of Polyglot Queries	2022	VLDB	5.3450701e-05
6,703	YeSQL: “You extend SQL” with Rich and Highly Performant User-Defined Functions in Relational Databases	2022	VLDB	4.9514593e-05
8,580	Efficient Execution of User-Defined Functions in SQL Queries	2023	VLDB	4.4876382e-05
9,699	A Fix for the Fixation on Fixpoints	2023	CIDR	4.2972307e-05
9,765	The UDFBench Benchmark for General-purpose UDF Queries	2025	VLDB	4.2815042e-05
9,813	Optimizing Nested Recursive Queries	2024	SIGMOD	4.2742278e-05
9,883	SQL Engines Excel at the Execution of Imperative Programs	2024	VLDB	4.2594931e-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
59	Efficiently Compiling Efficient Query Plans for Modern Hardware	2011	VLDB	0.0006445664
169	MAD Skills: New Analysis Practices for Big Data	2009	VLDB	0.00038967371
729	Umbra: A Disk-Based System with In-Memory Performance	2020	CIDR	0.00017448059
847	The case against specialized graph analytics engines	2015	CIDR	0.00015939766
982	The POSTGRES Data Model	1987	VLDB	0.00014865769
1,107	Froid: Optimization of Imperative Programs in a Relational Database	2018	VLDB	0.0001397627
1,534	Data Management in Machine Learning: Challenges, Techniques, and Systems	2017	SIGMOD	0.00011462072
2,922	RaSQL: Greater Power and Performance for Big Data Analytics with Recursive-aggregate-SQL on Spark	2019	SIGMOD	7.897179e-05
3,085	Compiling PL/SQL Away	2020	CIDR	7.5960713e-05
3,298	Extracting Equivalent SQL from Imperative Code in Database Applications	2016	SIGMOD	7.2527707e-05
4,571	BlackMagic: Automatic Inlining of Scalar UDFs into SQL Queries with Froid	2019	VLDB	6.0693276e-05
6,112	PL/SQL Without the PL	2020	SIGMOD	5.2009649e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,552	Evaluation Of Database Recursive Logic Programs As Recurrent Function Series	1986	SIGMOD	0.00011393892
1,875	An Architecture for Compiling UDF-centric Workflows	2015	VLDB	0.00010243959
4,567	User-Defined Table Operators: Enhancing Extensibility for ORDBMS	1999	VLDB	6.0728188e-05
4,571	BlackMagic: Automatic Inlining of Scalar UDFs into SQL Queries with Froid	2019	VLDB	6.0693276e-05
10,469	UDFBench: A Tool for Benchmarking UDF Queries on SQL Engines	2025	SIGMOD	4.1905499e-05
9,883	SQL Engines Excel at the Execution of Imperative Programs	2024	VLDB	4.2594931e-05
6,191	Accelerating Python UDFs in Vectorized Query Execution	2022	CIDR	5.1598046e-05
1,361	SQL/MapReduce: A practical approach to self-describing, polymorphic, and parallelizable user-defined functions	2009	VLDB	0.00012393719
9,765	The UDFBench Benchmark for General-purpose UDF Queries	2025	VLDB	4.2815042e-05
8,580	Efficient Execution of User-Defined Functions in SQL Queries	2023	VLDB	4.4876382e-05