The U. R. Strikes Back

Summary: Taxonomizes variants of the "universal relation" assumption and systematically rebuts prior objections, distinguishing fallacious, premature, and valid critiques. Presents practical remedies and the System/U query-interpretation algorithm to realize universal-relation benefits. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 603
Venue: PODS
Year: 1982
Pagerank: 0.00012131168
Overall Rank: 1,111 | 92.38%
DOI: 10.1145/588111.588114

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Jeffrey D. Ullman (Stanford University)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{ullman_pods82,
        address = {New York, NY, USA},
        series = {{PODS} '82},
        title = {{The U. R. Strikes Back}},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/588111.588114},
        doi = {10.1145/588111.588114},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} Symposium on {Principles} of {Database} {Systems}},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        author = {Ullman, Jeffrey D.},
        year = {1982}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 15 of 15 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,075	Updates Of Relational Views	1983	PODS	0.00012294896
1,537	Assumptions in Relational Database Theory	1982	PODS	0.00010460647
2,289	Windows On The World	1983	SIGMOD	8.7994393e-05
3,443	LAURA: A Formal Data Model and Her Logical Design Methodology	1983	VLDB	7.4116889e-05
3,551	Efficient Query Answering in the Representative Instance Approach	1985	PODS	7.3196924e-05
4,259	Database Decomposition into Fourth Normal Form	1983	VLDB	6.798826e-05
5,033	Universal Relation Views: A Pragmatic Approach	1983	VLDB	6.3934244e-05
7,132	Optimal Computation of Total Projections with Unions of Simple Chase Join Expressions	1984	SIGMOD	5.694968e-05
7,186	Structure and Complexity of Bag Consistency	2021	PODS	5.6777112e-05
9,259	Querying Weak Instances	1984	PODS	5.2970277e-05
9,260	The Revenge Of The Jd	1983	PODS	5.2970277e-05
11,136	Consistency of Relations over Monoids	2024	PODS	5.093636e-05
13,155	A Polynomial Time Algorithm for Testing Implications of a Join Dependency and Embodied Functional Dependencies	1988	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
13,193	On the Properties and Characterisation of Connection-trap-free Schemes (Extended Abstract)	1986	PODS	5.093636e-05
13,227	Dependency Characterizations For Acyclic Database Schemes	1984	PODS	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 2 of 2 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
97	Efficient Optimization of a Class of Relational Expressions	1978	SIGMOD	0.00034574497
266	Can We Use The Universal Instance Assumption Without Using Nulls?	1981	SIGMOD	0.00022823892

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	266	Can We Use The Universal Instance Assumption Without Using Nulls?	1981	SIGMOD
2	9,259	Querying Weak Instances	1984	PODS
3	1,537	Assumptions in Relational Database Theory	1982	PODS
4	4,606	Updating a Relational Database through a Universal Schema Interface	1985	PODS
5	3,648	A Universal Relation Database System Implemented Via the Network Model	1982	PODS
6	5,033	Universal Relation Views: A Pragmatic Approach	1983	VLDB
7	1,577	Compatible Attributes In A Universal Relation	1982	PODS
8	8,500	Answering Queries In Relational Databases	1983	SIGMOD
9	3,957	Specifying Connections for a Universal Relation Scheme Database	1982	SIGMOD
10	9,260	The Revenge Of The Jd	1983	PODS