Researcher Domagoj Vrgoč receives prestigious international award for research in databases
The SIGMOD Research Highlight award is one of the most prestigious in this field and has been given annually since 2016. The work, which involves the IMFD researcher and IMC UC academic, together with researchers from the company RelationalAI and other universities, focuses on relational databases that are currently used in complex transactions, banking systems, and e-commerce, among other areas.
A research project involving Domagoj Vrgoč, an academic at the Institute of Mathematical and Computational Engineering (IMC UC) and researcher at the Millennium Institute Foundational Research on Data (IMFD), has just received one of the SIGMOD Research Highlight awards. This is one of the most prestigious distinctions in the field of database research and has been given annually since 2016 to works that not only address a key problem, but also represent a definitive milestone in its resolution and demonstrate a significant impact both within and beyond their community.
The work was awarded by the Special Interest Group on Management of Data (SIGMOD) of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), an entity founded in 1947 as the first scientific and educational society in the field of computing. The research is titled “Rel: A Programming Language for Relational Data” and was developed by the IMFD researcher together with Molham Aref (Relational AI), Paolo Guagliardo (University of Edinburgh), George Kastrinis (Relational AI), Leonid Libkin (Relational AI), Victor Marsault (LIGM, Univ. Gustave Eiffel, CNRS), Wim Martens (Relational AI), Mary McGrath (Relational AI), Filip Murlak (University of Warsaw), Nathaniel Nystrom (Relational AI), Liat Peterfreund (Hebrew University), Allison Rogers (Relational AI), Cristina Sirangelo (Relational AI), David Zhao (Relational AI), and Abdul Zreika (Relational AI).
This paper falls within the field of so-called relational databases, which organize information into structured tables (rows/columns) with predefined relationships, ensuring high data consistency and integrity. Today they are fundamental in areas such as banking, where they are used in transactions that require a high level of integrity and consistency. They are also used in e-commerce for inventory management, user profiles, and order processing, as well as in human resources systems that handle payroll, employee personal data, and organizational structure, using SQL to manage critical data securely.
“In this work, developed in collaboration with colleagues from academia and industry, we address the long-standing problem of impedance mismatch. For over 50 years, relational data management has been limited to a divided system, which exclusively uses the SQL query standard for data retrieval, while relying on a standard programming language for application logic,” explains Vrgoč. This division, the researcher adds, generates “inherent friction, since the declarative nature of SQL clashes directly with the imperative, step-by-step execution of traditional programming languages.”
In the work, the academic notes, Rel is described as a “language that radically and ambitiously breaks with this paradigm. Rather than treating relational queries as an add-on, Rel is designed from the ground up as a complete programming language where the relation itself is the central element.”
Regarding this research, academics Viktor Leis and Thomas Neumann (Technical University of Munich) note that it “charts a compelling path toward simpler architectures, more reusable data logic, and relational systems built on more solid principles.”
Source: IMC UC