Database Theory: Past and Future

Summary: Survey of database theory's evolution emphasizing relational dependency and hypergraph results and the development of concurrency control/distributed database theory. Argues that underemphasized areas—logic-and-databases and object-oriented/network/hierarchical models—deserve more attention and will become influential. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 772
Venue: PODS
Year: 1987
Pagerank: 8.164514e-05
Overall Rank: 2,754 | 81.11%
DOI: 10.1145/28659.28660

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Jeffrey D. Ullman (Stanford University)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{ullman_pods87,
        address = {New York, NY, USA},
        series = {{PODS} '87},
        title = {{Database Theory: Past and Future}},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/28659.28660},
        doi = {10.1145/28659.28660},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} Symposium on {Principles} of {Database} {Systems}},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        author = {Ullman, Jeffrey D.},
        year = {1987}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 7 of 7 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
355	Object Identity As A Query Language Primitive	1989	SIGMOD	0.00020351749
684	A Data Model and Query Language for EXODUS	1988	SIGMOD	0.00014990873
1,891	A Logic for Object-Oriented Logic Programming (Maier's O-Logic Revisited)	1989	PODS	9.5298123e-05
2,296	Containment and Minimization of Positive Conjunctive Queries in OODB's (Extended Abstract)	1992	PODS	8.7908999e-05
4,121	Distributed Processing Of Logic Programs	1988	SIGMOD	6.8889854e-05
4,934	The Expressive Power of Structured Values in Pure OODB's (extended abstract)	1991	PODS	6.4357823e-05
13,140	A Deductive Method for Entity-Relationship Modeling (Extended Abstract)	1989	VLDB	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 3 of 3 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
63	An Amateur's Introduction to Recursive Query Processing Strategies	1986	SIGMOD	0.00038782376
313	OPTIMIZING DATALOG PROGRAMS (Extended Abstract)	1987	PODS	0.0002168869
4,713	On the Expressive Power of the Logical Data Model	1985	SIGMOD	6.5501272e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	557	The Theory of Probabilistic Databases	1987	VLDB
2	1,383	A Sophisticate's Introduction to Distributed Database Concurrency Control	1982	VLDB
3	13,101	Deductive Databases in Action	1991	PODS
4	1,537	Assumptions in Relational Database Theory	1982	PODS
5	14,504	Information Theoretic Aspects Of Data Bases	1983	PODS
6	2,957	Graph-Theoretic Methods In Database Theory	1990	PODS
7	2,110	Theory of Database Queries (Extended Abstract)	1988	PODS
8	14,249	Database Metatheory: Asking the Big Queries	1995	PODS
9	13,260	A Systematic Approach to Relational Database Theory	1982	SIGMOD
10	14,506	Database Theory: Where Has It Been? Where Is It Going?	1983	SIGMOD