Babelfish: Efficient Execution of Polyglot Queries

Summary: Babelfish unifies relational queries and multilingual UDFs in an IR, enabling cross-language fusion and specialization without cross-runtime materialization. It matches handwritten-code performance and outperforms prior systems by up to 10×. (summarized by gpt-5.6-luna on Jul 24 2026)

Paper ID: hb97602fca5f21d14
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2022
Pagerank: 6.1985833e-05
Overall Rank: 5,246 | 64.84%
DOI: 10.14778/3489496.3489501
PDF: Download (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Philipp Marian Grulich (Technical University of Berlin)
2. Steffen Zeuch (German National Research Center for Information Technology; Technical University of Berlin)
3. Volker Markl (German National Research Center for Information Technology; Technical University of Berlin)

BibTeX Citation

@article{grulich_vldb22,
        title = {{Babelfish: Efficient Execution of Polyglot Queries}},
        author = {Grulich, Philipp Marian and Zeuch, Steffen and Markl, Volker},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '22},
        volume = {15},
        number = {2},
        pages = {196--210},
        doi = {10.14778/3489496.3489501},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/3489496.3489501},
        year = {2022}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 13 of 13 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
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
6,428	Containerized Execution of UDFs: An Experimental Evaluation	2022	VLDB	5.7709339e-05
6,504	Nexus: Correlation Discovery over Collections of Spatio-Temporal Tabular Data	2024	SIGMOD	5.7456631e-05
6,765	Mitigating the Impedance Mismatch between Prediction Query Execution and Database Engine	2025	SIGMOD	5.6695399e-05
7,276	Showcasing Data Management Challenges for Future IoT Applications with NebulaStream	2023	VLDB	5.5515025e-05
8,002	Efficient Execution of User-Defined Functions in SQL Queries	2023	VLDB	5.3927693e-05
8,635	The Key to Effective UDF Optimization: Before Inlining, First Perform Outlining	2025	VLDB	5.2832224e-05
9,512	Query Compilation Without Regrets	2024	SIGMOD	5.1515819e-05
9,729	The UDFBench Benchmark for General-purpose UDF Queries	2025	VLDB	5.1202393e-05
10,228	Towards Unifying Query Interpretation and Compilation	2023	CIDR	5.0442181e-05
11,002	IMLane: Composable Framework for Efficient AI Function Execution in Database Engine	2026	VLDB	4.9605343e-05
11,245	Approximating Opaque Top-k Queries	2025	SIGMOD	4.9605343e-05
11,576	Fault Tolerance Placement in the Internet of Things	2024	SIGMOD	4.9605343e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 39 of 39 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
6	Pig Latin: A Not-So-Foreign Language for Data Processing	2008	SIGMOD	0.0010494385
14	MonetDB/X100: Hyper-Pipelining Query Execution	2005	CIDR	0.00063972112
21	Efficiently Compiling Efficient Query Plans for Modern Hardware	2011	VLDB	0.00056737487
375	Umbra: A Disk-Based System with In-Memory Performance	2020	CIDR	0.00019660459
498	Building Efficient Query Engines in a High-Level Language	2014	VLDB	0.00017323427
606	Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Compiled and Vectorized Queries But Were Afraid to Ask	2018	VLDB	0.00015609823
688	Trill: A High-Performance Incremental Query Processor for Diverse Analytics	2015	VLDB	0.00014736145
766	Conjunctive Selection Conditions in Main Memory	2002	PODS	0.00014105436
896	Froid: Optimization of Imperative Programs in a Relational Database	2018	VLDB	0.00013164545
1,128	Structured Streaming: A Declarative API for Real-Time Applications in Apache Spark	2018	SIGMOD	0.00011887295
1,197	Weld: A Common Runtime for High Performance Data Analytics	2017	CIDR	0.00011548039
1,449	An Architecture for Compiling UDF-centric Workflows	2015	VLDB	0.00010597074
1,756	How to Architect a Query Compiler	2016	SIGMOD	9.7053947e-05
1,937	Here are my Data Files. Here are my Queries. Where are my Results?	2011	CIDR	9.3333463e-05
2,199	Extending Relational Query Processing with ML Inference	2020	CIDR	8.8664379e-05
2,219	Magpie: Python at Speed and Scale using Cloud Backends	2021	CIDR	8.8186113e-05
2,258	Evaluating End-to-End Optimization for Data Analytics Applications in Weld	2018	VLDB	8.7387151e-05
2,278	An Intermediate Representation for Optimizing Machine Learning Pipelines	2019	VLDB	8.6993865e-05
2,433	How to Architect a Query Compiler, Revisited	2018	SIGMOD	8.4614165e-05
2,716	Compiling PL/SQL Away	2020	CIDR	8.0819509e-05
2,758	Implicit Parallelism through Deep Language Embedding	2015	SIGMOD	8.0283838e-05
2,992	StatusQuo: Making Familiar Abstractions Perform Using Program Analysis	2013	CIDR	7.7605188e-05
3,002	Extracting Equivalent SQL from Imperative Code in Database Applications	2016	SIGMOD	7.7473824e-05
3,397	Putting Pandas in a Box	2021	CIDR	7.3273688e-05
3,416	RHEEM: Enabling Cross-Platform Data Processing - May The Big Data Be With You! -	2018	VLDB	7.3046808e-05
3,510	Fast Queries Over Heterogeneous Data Through Engine Customization	2016	VLDB	7.2263115e-05
3,939	Analyzing Efficient Stream Processing on Modern Hardware	2019	VLDB	6.8967981e-05
4,078	Aggify: Lifting the Curse of Cursor Loops using Custom Aggregates	2020	SIGMOD	6.8028789e-05
4,817	Permutable Compiled Queries: Dynamically Adapting Compiled Queries without Recompiling	2021	VLDB	6.388743e-05
4,942	LightSaber: Efficient Window Aggregation on Multi-core Processors	2020	SIGMOD	6.3309707e-05
5,363	The NebulaStream Platform: Data and Application Management for the Internet of Things	2020	CIDR	6.1475521e-05
6,413	Functional-Style SQL UDFs With a Capital 'F'	2020	SIGMOD	5.7764365e-05
6,456	Grizzly: Efficient Stream Processing Through Adaptive Query Compilation	2020	SIGMOD	5.7616575e-05
6,996	SparkR: Scaling R Programs with Spark	2016	SIGMOD	5.6092026e-05
7,454	DBridge: Translating Imperative Code to SQL	2017	SIGMOD	5.5095611e-05
8,230	Architecting a Query Compiler for Spatial Workloads	2020	SIGMOD	5.3577081e-05
8,701	Adaptive Code Generation for Data-Intensive Analytics	2021	VLDB	5.2714222e-05
9,048	The Power of Nested Parallelism in Big Data Processing – Hitting Three Flies with One Slap –	2021	SIGMOD	5.2155403e-05
10,212	Thriving in the No Man’s Land between Compilers and Databases	2019	CIDR	5.0490854e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	498	Building Efficient Query Engines in a High-Level Language	2014	VLDB
2	5,723	Accelerating Python UDFs in Vectorized Query Execution	2022	CIDR
3	1,756	How to Architect a Query Compiler	2016	SIGMOD
4	9,636	Language-Agnostic Integrated Queries in a Managed Polyglot Runtime	2021	VLDB
5	13,959	BabbleFlow - A Translator for Analytic Data Flow Programs	2014	SIGMOD
6	6,452	Scalable Querying of Nested Data	2021	VLDB
7	6,305	Declarative Sub-Operators for Universal Data Processing	2023	VLDB
8	8,002	Efficient Execution of User-Defined Functions in SQL Queries	2023	VLDB
9	9,729	The UDFBench Benchmark for General-purpose UDF Queries	2025	VLDB
10	11,236	UDFBench: A Tool for Benchmarking UDF Queries on SQL Engines	2025	SIGMOD