​Welcome to another edition of South Bay Systems! This time we bring you two wonderful talks: Julian Hyde will be speaking about Morel, a new functional database query language in development, and Yuanyuan Tian will be presenting the CIDR'25 paper on Query Optimization as a Service.

​Agenda

• ​​​​6:00 PM: Doors open, food and socializing

• ​​​​6:30 PM — 6:50 PM: Morel Talk

• ​​6:50 PM — 7:30 PM: QOaaS Talk

• ​​​​7:30 PM onward : Community socializing!

​​​​Food and beverages will be provided, courtesy of our hosts, StarTree.

​Morel: A language for data

​SQL excels at queries but struggles with streaming, incremental computation, version control, refactoring, and modern development workflows. Can we build a language that keeps SQL's strengths while addressing these limitations?

​Morel combines functional programming with relational algebra to create a language as powerful as SQL but capable of solving a wider class of problems. This session introduces Morel and demonstrates how it addresses challenges like query federation, SQL dialect translation, streaming, and data engineering.

​Speaker Bio

​Julian Hyde is the author of Morel and creator of Apache Calcite, a widely-used open source query planning engine. He has pioneered SQL extensions for streaming and BI, and held senior engineering positions at Google and Hortonworks.

​Query Optimization as a Service

​Customer demand, regulatory pressure, and engineering efficiency are the driving forces behind the industry-wide trend of moving from siloed engines and services that are optimized in isolation to highly integrated solutions. This is confirmed by the wide adoption of open formats, shared component libraries, and the meteoric success of integrated data lake experiences such as Microsoft Fabric. In this work, we study the implications of this trend for a Query Optimizer (QO) and discuss our experience of building Calcite and extending Cascades into QO components of Microsoft SQL Server, Fabric Data Warehouse (DW), and SCOPE. We weigh the pros and cons of a drastic change in direction: moving from bespoke QOs or library-sharing (a la Calcite) to rewriting the QO stack and fully embracing Query Optimizer as a Service (QOaaS). We report on some early successes and stumbles as we explore these ideas with prototypes compatible with Fabric DW and Spark. The benefits include centralized workload-level optimizations, multi-engine federation, and accelerated feature creation, but the challenges are equally daunting.

​Speaker Bio

​Yuanyuan Tian is currently a Principal Scientist Manager and a Graph Architect at Microsoft Gray Systems Lab and an ACM Distinguished Member. Before Microsoft, she was a Principal Research Staff Member at IBM Almaden Research Center. She received her PhD degree in Computer Science & Engineering in 2008 and MS degree in Computer Science & Engineering in 2005 both from University of Michigan, and BS degree in Computer Science & Technology with honor in 2003 from Peking University.