One WITH RECURSIVE is Worth Many GOTOs

Summary: Translates PL/SQL UDFs into SQL queries, moving evaluation entirely to SQL. Uses trampolined nesting to map control flow to recursive CTEs, eliminating imperative-declarative friction and yielding ~2x speedups, exposing cross-world interpretation. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: hcd36fb19d87be027
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2021
Pagerank: 7.546228e-05
Overall Rank: 3,195 | 78.53%
DOI: 10.1145/3448016.3457272

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

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

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{hirn_sigmod21,
        title = {{One WITH RECURSIVE is Worth Many GOTOs}},
        author = {Hirn, Denis and Grust, Torsten},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '21},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/3448016.3457272},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3448016.3457272},
        year = {2021}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 17 of 17 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
3,645	User-Defined Operators: Efficiently Integrating Custom Algorithms into Modern Databases	2022	VLDB	7.1383149e-05
4,302	Efficient and Portable Einstein Summation in SQL	2023	SIGMOD	6.6754218e-05
5,616	BOSS - An Architecture for Database Kernel Composition	2024	VLDB	6.0623704e-05
5,811	Snakes on a Plan: Compiling Python Functions into Plain SQL Queries	2022	SIGMOD	5.9846446e-05
6,086	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	5.8893767e-05
6,711	Machine Learning, Linear Algebra, and More: Is SQL All You Need?	2022	CIDR	5.7011955e-05
7,452	A Fix for the Fixation on Fixpoints	2023	CIDR	5.5213651e-05
8,362	Optimizing Nested Recursive Queries	2024	SIGMOD	5.3456573e-05
9,596	The Key to Effective UDF Optimization: Before Inlining, First Perform Outlining	2025	VLDB	5.1543679e-05
9,645	QURE: AI-Assisted and Automatically Verified UDF Inlining	2025	SIGMOD	5.1437878e-05
9,988	Trampoline-Style Queries for SQL	2025	CIDR	5.0989764e-05
10,229	SQL Engines Excel at the Execution of Imperative Programs	2024	VLDB	5.054828e-05
11,046	Future-Proof Data Systems	2026	VLDB	4.9769913e-05
11,135	Dynamic Pruning for Recursive Joins	2025	SIGMOD	4.9769913e-05
11,186	Approximating Opaque Top-k Queries	2025	SIGMOD	4.9769913e-05
11,351	Towards Designing Future-Proof Data Processing Systems	2025	VLDB	4.9769913e-05
11,803	To UDFs and Beyond: Demonstration of a Fully Decomposed Data Processor for General Data Wrangling Tasks	2023	VLDB	4.9769913e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 17 of 17 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	0.00056835296
23	Spark SQL: Relational Data Processing in Spark	2015	SIGMOD	0.00055384955
503	Towards a Unified Architecture for in-RDBMS Analytics	2012	SIGMOD	0.00017195428
552	Orthogonal Optimization of Subqueries and Aggregation	2001	SIGMOD	0.00016530708
896	Froid: Optimization of Imperative Programs in a Relational Database	2018	VLDB	0.00013203085
1,143	The POSTGRES Data Model	1987	VLDB	0.00011842018
1,275	Rewriting Procedures for Batched Bindings	2008	VLDB	0.00011242055
2,401	Declarative Recursive Computation on an RDBMS or, Why You Should Use a Database For Distributed Machine Learning	2019	VLDB	8.517457e-05
2,618	The MemSQL Query Optimizer: A modern optimizer for real-time analytics in a distributed database	2016	VLDB	8.2193318e-05
2,707	Compiling PL/SQL Away	2020	CIDR	8.1073034e-05
2,994	Extracting Equivalent SQL from Imperative Code in Database Applications	2016	SIGMOD	7.7685417e-05
4,062	Aggify: Lifting the Curse of Cursor Loops using Custom Aggregates	2020	SIGMOD	6.8215782e-05
4,257	BlackMagic: Automatic Inlining of Scalar UDFs into SQL Queries with Froid	2019	VLDB	6.6976163e-05
4,964	Avalanche-Safe LINQ Compilation	2010	VLDB	6.335593e-05
5,906	PL/SQL Without the PL	2020	SIGMOD	5.9495255e-05
5,934	The Flatter, the Better: Query Compilation Based on the Flattening Transformation	2015	SIGMOD	5.9392173e-05
6,402	Functional-Style SQL UDFs With a Capital 'F'	2020	SIGMOD	5.7953646e-05

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#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	14,551	Supporting Procedural Constructs in SQL Compilers	1996	VLDB
2	9,356	Optimizing Recursive Queries in SQL	2005	SIGMOD
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4	12,018	Low-Latency Compilation of SQL Queries to Machine Code	2021	VLDB
5	5,811	Snakes on a Plan: Compiling Python Functions into Plain SQL Queries	2022	SIGMOD
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