ISO SQL Working Group Convenor, Keith Hare, has kindly shared a presentation he’s giving today at Denison University, Granville, Ohio. It’s an interesting summary of the history of the SQL Standard. It also talks about emerging and projected work planned by the SQL group (WG3), and includes a section on property graph querying, which is an area under active consideration. The primary discussions on graph querying are happening in the INCITS Ad Hoc group looking at SQL Graph extensions. (INCITS is the U.S. standards formation body where much work on SQL takes place before consideration at the international level in ISO WG3). Neo4j recently joined INCITS, reflecting our active participation in the Graph Extensions Ad Hoc. We’re very interested in promoting a good relationship between SQL and Cypher: for example, how to express relational data as a graph? Or how to compose SQL with Cypher through SQL graph functions. Other ideas under consideration include the idea of a “Common Core Path Pattern” sub-language that could be shared across SQL and Cypher.

---

By the way, the recently added References page on the openCypher website is a very useful resource, and if anyone in the openCypher community would like to add papers or presentations, you can contact Petra Selmer at petra.selmer@neo4j.com who convenes the openCypher Implementers Group. This article gives an overview of the topics on the page, and that’s where we’ve posted Keith’s slides. Thanks again to Keith for letting us host this interesting presentation.