A Researcher’s Digest of GQL (Invited Talk)

Authors Nadime Francis, Amélie Gheerbrant , Paolo Guagliardo , Leonid Libkin , Victor Marsault , Wim Martens , Filip Murlak , Liat Peterfreund , Alexandra Rogova, Domagoj Vrgoč



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Author Details

Nadime Francis
  • Laboratoire d'Informatique Gaspard Monge, Université Gustave Eiffel, CNRS, France
Amélie Gheerbrant
  • IRIF, Université Paris Cité, CNRS, Paris, France
Paolo Guagliardo
  • School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, UK
Leonid Libkin
  • University of Edinburgh, UK
  • RelationalAI, France
  • ENS, PSL University, France
Victor Marsault
  • Laboratoire d'Informatique Gaspard Monge, Université Gustave Eiffel, CNRS, France
Wim Martens
  • Universität Bayreuth, Germany
Filip Murlak
  • University of Warsaw, Poland
Liat Peterfreund
  • Laboratoire d'Informatique Gaspard Monge, Université Gustave Eiffel, CNRS, France
Alexandra Rogova
  • IRIF, Université Paris Cité, CNRS, Paris, France
  • Data Intelligence Institute of Paris, Inria
Domagoj Vrgoč
  • University of Zagreb, Coratia
  • Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to members of the ISO/IEC JTC1 SC32 WG3 committee and especially Fred Zemke for many comments on our formalization of the language.

Cite As Get BibTex

Nadime Francis, Amélie Gheerbrant, Paolo Guagliardo, Leonid Libkin, Victor Marsault, Wim Martens, Filip Murlak, Liat Peterfreund, Alexandra Rogova, and Domagoj Vrgoč. A Researcher’s Digest of GQL (Invited Talk). In 26th International Conference on Database Theory (ICDT 2023). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 255, pp. 1:1-1:22, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2023) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ICDT.2023.1

Abstract

GQL (Graph Query Language) is being developed as a new ISO standard for graph query languages to play the same role for graph databases as SQL plays for relational. In parallel, an extension of SQL for querying property graphs, SQL/PGQ, is added to the SQL standard; it shares the graph pattern matching functionality with GQL. Both standards (not yet published) are hard-to-understand specifications of hundreds of pages. The goal of this paper is to present a digest of the language that is easy for the research community to understand, and thus to initiate research on these future standards for querying graphs. The paper concentrates on pattern matching features shared by GQL and SQL/PGQ, as well as querying facilities of GQL.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Theory of computation → Database theory
  • Theory of computation → Database query languages (principles)
  • Information systems → Graph-based database models
  • Information systems → Structured Query Language
Keywords
  • GQL
  • Property Graph
  • Query Language
  • Graph Database
  • Pattern matching
  • Multi-Graph

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