Relations with Relation Names as Arguments: Algebra and Calculus

Summary: Allow relation names as first-class arguments by extending relational algebra with relation‑access operators and a HiLog-based relational calculus to encode object‑oriented patterns. Prove algebra–calculus correspondences, show strictly greater expressiveness than RA on any DB, and argue practical implementability. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 978
Venue: PODS
Year: 1992
Pagerank: 9.4692029e-05
Overall Rank: 1,928 | 86.78%
DOI: 10.1145/137097.137905

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Kenneth A. Ross (Columbia University)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{ross_pods92,
        address = {New York, NY, USA},
        series = {{PODS} '92},
        title = {{Relations with Relation Names as Arguments: Algebra and Calculus}},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/137097.137905},
        doi = {10.1145/137097.137905},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} Symposium on {Principles} of {Database} {Systems}},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        author = {Ross, Kenneth A.},
        year = {1992}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 13 of 13 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,038	Storage and Querying of E-Commerce Data	2001	VLDB	0.00012476189
1,558	SchemaSQL - A Language for Interoperability in Relational Multi-database Systems	1996	VLDB	0.00010366362
1,609	Managing Semantic Heterogeneity in Databases : A Theoretical Perspective	1997	PODS	0.00010225236
1,708	Using Schematically Heterogeneous Structures	1998	SIGMOD	9.958846e-05
3,889	On Efficiently Implementing SchemaSQL on a SQL Database System	1999	VLDB	7.0440224e-05
5,761	Rel: A Programming Language for Relational Data	2025	SIGMOD	6.0957569e-05
7,196	Typed Query Languages for Databases Containing Queries	1998	PODS	5.6764289e-05
7,270	A Crash Course on Database Queries	2007	PODS	5.6595955e-05
7,654	Positive Higher-Order Queries	2010	PODS	5.5746273e-05
7,793	Reflective programming in the relational algebra (extended abstract)	1993	PODS	5.5430288e-05
11,084	Exploring Exploratory Querying	2025	VLDB	5.093636e-05
11,356	Zed: Leveraging Data Types to Process Eclectic Data	2023	CIDR	5.093636e-05
12,935	nD-SQL: A Multi-dimensional Language for Interoperability and OLAP	1998	VLDB	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
3,583	Glue-Nail: A Deductive Database System	1991	SIGMOD	7.2861437e-05
14,396	On Negation in HiLog	1991	PODS	-

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	544	A New Approach to Database Logic	1984	PODS
2	13,055	Interpreting a Reconstructed Relational Calculus: Extended Abstract	1993	SIGMOD
3	13,237	Relational Algebras, Logic, And Functional Programming	1984	SIGMOD
4	5,632	Extending the Relational Algebra to Support Transaction Time	1987	SIGMOD
5	1,003	Algebraic Support for Complex Objects with Arrays, Identity, and Inheritance	1991	SIGMOD
6	2,897	On the Expressive Power of Database Queries with Intermediate Types	1988	PODS
7	1,860	Querying Multiple Features of Groups in Relational Databases	1996	VLDB
8	8,407	On The Reasonable Effectiveness of Relational Diagrams: Explaining Relational Query Patterns and the Pattern Expressiveness of Relational Languages	2024	SIGMOD
9	7,196	Typed Query Languages for Databases Containing Queries	1998	PODS
10	3,372	Incorporating Computed Relations in Relational Databases	1981	SIGMOD