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: 5984
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2020
Pagerank: 5.9113895e-05
Overall Rank: 6,328 | 56.59%
DOI: 10.1145/3318464.3389707

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Christian Duta (University of Tübingen)
2. Torsten Grust (University of Tübingen)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{duta_sigmod20,
        title = {{Functional-Style SQL UDFs With a Capital 'F'}},
        author = {Duta, Christian and Grust, Torsten},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '20},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/3318464.3389707},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3318464.3389707},
        year = {2020}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 9 of 9 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,892	Procedural Extensions of SQL: Understanding their usage in the wild	2021	VLDB	9.5277793e-05
3,257	One WITH RECURSIVE is Worth Many GOTOs	2021	SIGMOD	7.590651e-05
5,301	Babelfish: Efficient Execution of Polyglot Queries	2022	VLDB	6.2750553e-05
6,314	YeSQL: "You extend SQL" with Rich and Highly Performant User-Defined Functions in Relational Databases	2022	VLDB	5.9157364e-05
8,096	Efficient Execution of User-Defined Functions in SQL Queries	2023	VLDB	5.4875738e-05
9,833	A Fix for the Fixation on Fixpoints	2023	CIDR	5.2115442e-05
9,917	The UDFBench Benchmark for General-purpose UDF Queries	2025	VLDB	5.1955087e-05
9,960	Optimizing Nested Recursive Queries	2024	SIGMOD	5.1879626e-05
10,040	SQL Engines Excel at the Execution of Imperative Programs	2024	VLDB	5.1723558e-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
23	Efficiently Compiling Efficient Query Plans for Modern Hardware	2011	VLDB	0.00054886415
155	MAD Skills: New Analysis Practices for Big Data	2009	VLDB	0.00028713176
422	Umbra: A Disk-Based System with In-Memory Performance	2020	CIDR	0.00018732744
759	The case against specialized graph analytics engines	2015	CIDR	0.00014273591
894	Froid: Optimization of Imperative Programs in a Relational Database	2018	VLDB	0.00013367658
1,118	The POSTGRES Data Model	1987	VLDB	0.00012104924
1,250	Data Management in Machine Learning: Challenges, Techniques, and Systems	2017	SIGMOD	0.00011485301
2,684	Compiling PL/SQL Away	2020	CIDR	8.25952e-05
2,935	RaSQL: Greater Power and Performance for Big Data Analytics with Recursive-aggregate-SQL on Spark	2019	SIGMOD	7.9444531e-05
2,939	Extracting Equivalent SQL from Imperative Code in Database Applications	2016	SIGMOD	7.9395908e-05
4,180	BlackMagic: Automatic Inlining of Scalar UDFs into SQL Queries with Froid	2019	VLDB	6.8487143e-05
5,828	PL/SQL Without the PL	2020	SIGMOD	6.073983e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	2,054	Evaluation Of Database Recursive Logic Programs As Recurrent Function Series	1986	SIGMOD
2	1,442	An Architecture for Compiling UDF-centric Workflows	2015	VLDB
3	4,645	User-Defined Table Operators: Enhancing Extensibility for ORDBMS	1999	VLDB
4	4,180	BlackMagic: Automatic Inlining of Scalar UDFs into SQL Queries with Froid	2019	VLDB
5	10,740	UDFBench: A Tool for Benchmarking UDF Queries on SQL Engines	2025	SIGMOD
6	10,040	SQL Engines Excel at the Execution of Imperative Programs	2024	VLDB
7	5,791	Accelerating Python UDFs in Vectorized Query Execution	2022	CIDR
8	1,264	SQL/MapReduce: A practical approach to self-describing, polymorphic, and parallelizable user-defined functions	2009	VLDB
9	9,917	The UDFBench Benchmark for General-purpose UDF Queries	2025	VLDB
10	8,096	Efficient Execution of User-Defined Functions in SQL Queries	2023	VLDB