SQL Engines Excel at the Execution of Imperative Programs

Summary: Compiles arbitrarily branching and looping imperative programs into plain (possibly recursive) SQL:1999 CTEs, including hundreds-line programs. Batch execution over tabular inputs enables query-engine parallelism and can outperform or add UDF support without a dedicated interpreter. (summarized by gpt-5.6-luna on Jul 24 2026)

Paper ID: h10b55b073aa00c20
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2024
Pagerank: 5.0381136e-05
Overall Rank: 10,260 | 31.23%
DOI: 10.14778/3704965.3704976
PDF: Download (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Tim Fischer (University of Tübingen)
2. Denis Hirn (University of Tübingen)
3. Torsten Grust (University of Tübingen)

BibTeX Citation

@article{fischer_vldb24,
        title = {{SQL Engines Excel at the Execution of Imperative Programs}},
        author = {Fischer, Tim and Hirn, Denis and Grust, Torsten},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '24},
        volume = {17},
        number = {13},
        pages = {4696--4708},
        doi = {10.14778/3704965.3704976},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/3704965.3704976},
        year = {2024}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 1 of 1 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
9,729	The UDFBench Benchmark for General-purpose UDF Queries	2025	VLDB	5.1202393e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 22 of 22 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
21	Efficiently Compiling Efficient Query Plans for Modern Hardware	2011	VLDB	0.00056737487
215	Morsel-Driven Parallelism: A NUMA-Aware Query Evaluation Framework for the Many-Core Age	2014	SIGMOD	0.00024554257
295	LINQ: Reconciling Objects, Relations and XML in the .NET Framework	2006	SIGMOD	0.00021876398
375	Umbra: A Disk-Based System with In-Memory Performance	2020	CIDR	0.00019660459
651	Amazon Redshift Re-invented	2022	SIGMOD	0.00015126716
896	Froid: Optimization of Imperative Programs in a Relational Database	2018	VLDB	0.00013164545
1,144	The POSTGRES Data Model	1987	VLDB	0.00011804665
1,197	Weld: A Common Runtime for High Performance Data Analytics	2017	CIDR	0.00011548039
1,276	Rewriting Procedures for Batched Bindings	2008	VLDB	0.00011210489
1,800	Procedural Extensions of SQL: Understanding their usage in the wild	2021	VLDB	9.5999908e-05
3,002	Extracting Equivalent SQL from Imperative Code in Database Applications	2016	SIGMOD	7.7473824e-05
3,190	One WITH RECURSIVE is Worth Many GOTOs	2021	SIGMOD	7.5364422e-05
3,654	User-Defined Operators: Efficiently Integrating Custom Algorithms into Modern Databases	2022	VLDB	7.1147757e-05
4,078	Aggify: Lifting the Curse of Cursor Loops using Custom Aggregates	2020	SIGMOD	6.8028789e-05
4,271	BlackMagic: Automatic Inlining of Scalar UDFs into SQL Queries with Froid	2019	VLDB	6.6760614e-05
4,985	Avalanche-Safe LINQ Compilation	2010	VLDB	6.3150185e-05
5,792	Snakes on a Plan: Compiling Python Functions into Plain SQL Queries	2022	SIGMOD	5.9761316e-05
5,919	PL/SQL Without the PL	2020	SIGMOD	5.9306506e-05
6,100	Dear User-Defined Functions, Inlining isn't working out so great for us. Let's try batching to make our relationship work. Sincerely, SQL	2024	CIDR	5.8699028e-05
6,218	YeSQL: "You extend SQL" with Rich and Highly Performant User-Defined Functions in Relational Databases	2022	VLDB	5.8292066e-05
6,413	Functional-Style SQL UDFs With a Capital 'F'	2020	SIGMOD	5.7764365e-05
6,726	Machine Learning, Linear Algebra, and More: Is SQL All You Need?	2022	CIDR	5.6824602e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	3,190	One WITH RECURSIVE is Worth Many GOTOs	2021	SIGMOD
2	9,729	The UDFBench Benchmark for General-purpose UDF Queries	2025	VLDB
3	11,236	UDFBench: A Tool for Benchmarking UDF Queries on SQL Engines	2025	SIGMOD
4	5,723	Accelerating Python UDFs in Vectorized Query Execution	2022	CIDR
5	4,746	User-Defined Table Operators: Enhancing Extensibility for ORDBMS	1999	VLDB
6	896	Froid: Optimization of Imperative Programs in a Relational Database	2018	VLDB
7	6,413	Functional-Style SQL UDFs With a Capital 'F'	2020	SIGMOD
8	4,544	Just-in-time compilation for SQL query processing	2013	VLDB
9	8,002	Efficient Execution of User-Defined Functions in SQL Queries	2023	VLDB
10	3,002	Extracting Equivalent SQL from Imperative Code in Database Applications	2016	SIGMOD