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: 6.2189001e-05
Overall Rank: 5,230 | 64.84%
DOI: 10.14778/3489496.3489501

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
6,085	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	5.892166e-05
6,415	Containerized Execution of UDFs: An Experimental Evaluation	2022	VLDB	5.7926473e-05
6,491	Nexus: Correlation Discovery over Collections of Spatio-Temporal Tabular Data	2024	SIGMOD	5.7674551e-05
6,742	Mitigating the Impedance Mismatch between Prediction Query Execution and Database Engine	2025	SIGMOD	5.6910432e-05
7,255	Showcasing Data Management Challenges for Future IoT Applications with NebulaStream	2023	VLDB	5.5725581e-05
7,983	Efficient Execution of User-Defined Functions in SQL Queries	2023	VLDB	5.4131297e-05
9,472	Query Compilation Without Regrets	2024	SIGMOD	5.1711207e-05
9,588	The Key to Effective UDF Optimization: Before Inlining, First Perform Outlining	2025	VLDB	5.156809e-05
9,694	The UDFBench Benchmark for General-purpose UDF Queries	2025	VLDB	5.1396592e-05
10,193	Towards Unifying Query Interpretation and Compilation	2023	CIDR	5.0633497e-05
10,932	IMLane: Composable Framework for Efficient AI Function Execution in Database Engine	2026	VLDB	4.9793485e-05
11,177	Approximating Opaque Top-k Queries	2025	SIGMOD	4.9793485e-05
11,521	Fault Tolerance Placement in the Internet of Things	2024	SIGMOD	4.9793485e-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	0.001052036
14	MonetDB/X100: Hyper-Pipelining Query Execution	2005	CIDR	0.00064031282
21	Efficiently Compiling Efficient Query Plans for Modern Hardware	2011	VLDB	0.00056855599
373	Umbra: A Disk-Based System with In-Memory Performance	2020	CIDR	0.00019711632
495	Building Efficient Query Engines in a High-Level Language	2014	VLDB	0.00017370758
605	Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Compiled and Vectorized Queries But Were Afraid to Ask	2018	VLDB	0.00015647561
685	Trill: A High-Performance Incremental Query Processor for Diverse Analytics	2015	VLDB	0.00014782777
761	Conjunctive Selection Conditions in Main Memory	2002	PODS	0.00014143602
896	Froid: Optimization of Imperative Programs in a Relational Database	2018	VLDB	0.00013209291
1,123	Structured Streaming: A Declarative API for Real-Time Applications in Apache Spark	2018	SIGMOD	0.0001193233
1,193	Weld: A Common Runtime for High Performance Data Analytics	2017	CIDR	0.0001158809
1,444	An Architecture for Compiling UDF-centric Workflows	2015	VLDB	0.0001063181
1,742	How to Architect a Query Compiler	2016	SIGMOD	9.7378418e-05
1,925	Here are my Data Files. Here are my Queries. Where are my Results?	2011	CIDR	9.3670488e-05
2,182	Extending Relational Query Processing with ML Inference	2020	CIDR	8.8982998e-05
2,207	Magpie: Python at Speed and Scale using Cloud Backends	2021	CIDR	8.8487039e-05
2,249	Evaluating End-to-End Optimization for Data Analytics Applications in Weld	2018	VLDB	8.7549752e-05
2,264	An Intermediate Representation for Optimizing Machine Learning Pipelines	2019	VLDB	8.7289107e-05
2,419	How to Architect a Query Compiler, Revisited	2018	SIGMOD	8.4923505e-05
2,705	Compiling PL/SQL Away	2020	CIDR	8.1111408e-05
2,754	Implicit Parallelism through Deep Language Embedding	2015	SIGMOD	8.0534972e-05
2,979	StatusQuo: Making Familiar Abstractions Perform Using Program Analysis	2013	CIDR	7.789233e-05
2,993	Extracting Equivalent SQL from Imperative Code in Database Applications	2016	SIGMOD	7.7721951e-05
3,384	Putting Pandas in a Box	2021	CIDR	7.3550055e-05
3,402	RHEEM: Enabling Cross-Platform Data Processing - May The Big Data Be With You! -	2018	VLDB	7.3304477e-05
3,505	Fast Queries Over Heterogeneous Data Through Engine Customization	2016	VLDB	7.2508161e-05
3,922	Analyzing Efficient Stream Processing on Modern Hardware	2019	VLDB	6.9229432e-05
4,061	Aggify: Lifting the Curse of Cursor Loops using Custom Aggregates	2020	SIGMOD	6.824809e-05
4,793	Permutable Compiled Queries: Dynamically Adapting Compiled Queries without Recompiling	2021	VLDB	6.4127583e-05
4,918	LightSaber: Efficient Window Aggregation on Multi-core Processors	2020	SIGMOD	6.3548575e-05
5,343	The NebulaStream Platform: Data and Application Management for the Internet of Things	2020	CIDR	6.1708665e-05
6,400	Functional-Style SQL UDFs With a Capital 'F'	2020	SIGMOD	5.7981078e-05
6,441	Grizzly: Efficient Stream Processing Through Adaptive Query Compilation	2020	SIGMOD	5.7834762e-05
6,987	SparkR: Scaling R Programs with Spark	2016	SIGMOD	5.6283496e-05
7,438	DBridge: Translating Imperative Code to SQL	2017	SIGMOD	5.5272264e-05
8,207	Architecting a Query Compiler for Spatial Workloads	2020	SIGMOD	5.3778259e-05
8,673	Adaptive Code Generation for Data-Intensive Analytics	2021	VLDB	5.2913671e-05
9,034	The Power of Nested Parallelism in Big Data Processing – Hitting Three Flies with One Slap –	2021	SIGMOD	5.2334993e-05
10,174	Thriving in the No Man’s Land between Compilers and Databases	2019	CIDR	5.0681899e-05

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