SQL à la Carte -- Toward Tailor-made Data Management

kaestner@cs.cmu.edu (M. Rosenmüller, C. Kästner, N. Siegmund, S. Sunkle, S. Apel, T. Leich, G. Saake)
Fri, 10 Jan 2025 13:48:21 GMT

Marko Rosenmüller, Christian Kästner, Norbert Siegmund, Sagar Sunkle, Sven Apel, Thomas Leich, and Gunter Saake. SQL à la Carte -- Toward Tailor-made Data Management. In Proceedings of the 13. GI-Fachtagung Datenbanksysteme für Business, Technologie und Web (BTW), ISBN 978-3-88579-238-3, pages 117--136, Bonn, Germany: Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI), March 2009.

The size of the structured query language (SQL) continuously increases. Extensions of SQL for special domains like stream processing or sensor networks come with own extensions, more or less unrelated to the standard. In general, underlying DBMS support only a subset of SQL plus vendor specific extensions. In this paper, we analyze application domains where special SQL dialects are needed or are already in use. We show how SQL can be decomposed to create an extensible family of SQL dialects. Concrete dialects, e.g., a dialect for web databases, can be generated from such a family by choosing SQL features à la carte. A family of SQL dialects simplifies analysis of the standard when deriving a concrete dialect, makes it easy to understand parts of the standard, and eases extension for new application domains. It is also the starting point for developing tailor-made data management solutions that support only a subset of SQL. We outline how such customizable DBMS can be developed and what benefits, e.g., improved maintainability and performance, we can expect from this.