GQL Standard

December 2, 2022 – GQL Status Update

At the end August, 2022, the GQL standards committee (ISO/IEC JTC1 SC32 WG3) initiated a second Committee Draft (CD2) consultation on the GQL draft. (This used to be a CD ballot, but as of July 2022 ISO changed the terminology for a CD from "ballot" to "consultation".) In any case, the CD2 period ended on 2022-10-26, with a fair number of comments. The breakdown of the CD2 comments is:

So far, about 25% of the comments have been resolved, either editorially, or through papers reviewed and excepted at the November WG3 meeting. WG3 participants have signed up to resolve another 29% of the comments.

Of the 239 comments for which participants have signed up, we have 14 papers addressing about 160 comments submitted for next week's WG3 web conference. In the following chart, slices identified by WG3:W24-nnn are papers that have already been submitted. Slices with names instead of numbers are papers that are in process and not yet ready for review.

One of the challenges of using web conferences for meetings of an international committee is that there is no single good time. The WG3 meeting next week is three 3-hour sessions on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Each session starts at 07:00 in Tokyo and Seoul, 06:00 in Beijing, 23:00 in Berlin, 22:00 in London, 17:00 in New York, and 14:00 in San Francisco.

We still have a lot of work to do, but we are on target to have the GQL draft ready to submit for a Draft International Standard (DIS) ballot in spring, 2023.

There are a lot of capabilities specified in the GQL draft. However, It does not have everything that every one will want. The Linked Data Benchmark Council (https://ldbcouncil.org/) has initiated a new activity, the LDBC Extended GQL Schema Working Group. The new working group is currently forming five sub-groups to focus on the areas:

  • Use Cases and Requirements

  • SHACL analysis

  • DDL representation + Parser

  • Visual representation

  • Graph representation

This work will provide input to SC32 WG3 for the next version of the GQL standard and will probably produce an academic paper or two on theoretical underpinnings of property graph schemas.

July, 2022 – GQL Status Update

In June, SC32 WG3 had a two week meeting in Berlin, Germany. We had 10 to 12 people in the room and several more people included by web conference. We accomplished two major things.

  1. We completed the work needed to initiate a Draft International Standard (DIS) ballot on eleven parts of ISO/IEC 9075 Information Technology — Database Language — SQL, including 9075-16 SQL/PGQ –Property Graph Queries in SQL. The documents will be sent to ISO Central Secretariat at the beginning of August. The DIS process is 20 weeks (8 weeks of preliminary ISO CS time then 12 weeks for the actual ballot), so the ballot should be complete by the end of December 2022.

  2. We made significant progress on resolving the CD ballot comments on ISO/IEC 39075 Information Technology — Database Languages — GQL We are going to conduct an 8-week second CD consultation (formerly called a ballot) starting in September. This will give us a chance to review the changes we've been making in response to first set of CD comments. We plan to initiate the GQL DIS in spring, 2023.

SQL/PGQ is interesting to people focused on GQL because the Graph Pattern Matching (GPM) language in SQL/PGQ is essentially identical to GPM in GQL. Since the technical work on SQL/PGQ is now stable, GPM in GQL is now stable. For more information on GPM, take a look at the 2022 ACM SIGMOD paper Graph Pattern Matching in GQL and SQL/PGQ.

At the start of the Berlin WG3 meeting, we had resolved 311 comments. By the end of the Berlin meeting, we had resolved 532 comments, just under two-thirds of the total comments. The pie-chart now shows two classes of resolved comments, "1-resolved editorially" and "2-resolved". We still have a lot of work to do, but we accomplished a lot during the June meeting.

Papers resolving the comments that are assigned will be processed during the August WG3 web conference.

June, 2022 – GQL Status Update

It turns out that writing a database language standards is a lot of work, but we are making progress.

'We" are the participants in the international standards committee ISO/IEC JTC/1 SC/32 WG/3 Database Languages and the participants in the various national standards groups that send papers and experts to SC32 WG3.

The GQL standards project is officially ISO/IEC 39075 Information Technology — Database Languages — GQL

SC32 WG3 initiated a Committee Draft (CD) ballot in November 2021. The ballot closed in February 2022 with over 800 comments. The breakdown of the comments is:

The GQL editors will resolve most Major (50) and Minor (196) Editorial comments – 31% of the comments. Many (most?) of the Language Opportunities (93) will be deferred to a future GQL version – 11%. That still leaves a lot of comments to resolve.

Since February, we have been made progress on comment resolution. As of the beginning of June, 2022, 311 comments have been resolved and WG3 participants have signed up to resolve another 125 comments.

The June 2022 WG3 meeting will process papers resolving the assigned comments as well as not yet assigned comments.

September, 2019 – GQL inaugurated as an official ISO project. See New Query Language for Graph Databases to Become International Standard for more information.

GQL is an upcoming International Standard language for property graph querying that is currently being created. The idea of a standalone graph query language to complement SQL was raised by ISO SC32/ WG3 members in early 2017, and is echoed in the GQL manifesto of May 2018.

GQL supporters aim to develop a rock-solid next-generation declarative graph query language that builds on the foundations of SQL and integrates proven ideas from the existing openCypher, PGQL, GSQL, and G-CORE languages. The proposed SQL:202x Property Graph Query Extensions already build on these existing languages.

GQL will incorporate this prior work, as part of an expanded set of features including regular path queries, graph compositional queries (enabling views) and schema support.

Site Purpose and Goals

This site serves as a hub for sharing information and ideas about the ongoing development of the GQL standard proposal.

  • Graph Query Language Requirements

  • Use cases for specific capabilities

  • Graph Query Language resources, conferences and workshops

  • Updates on the progress of a formal GQL Standard.

To get more information or to get involved, please refer to the links on the Collaboration page.