graph-data-management

Pointers for GQL and SQL/PGQ

This page contains pointers to the GQL (Graph Query Language) standard and the SQL/PGQ extension of the SQL standard. Both allow querying property graphs using the visual graph syntax (a.k.a. ASCII art syntax) popularized by Cypher.

Implementations

Systems supporting GQL and SQL/PGQ

System	Language	Developed in
Oracle 23ai	SQL/PGQ	industry
Google Cloud Spanner Graph	GQL	industry
DuckPGQ	SQL/PGQ	academia

See also the joint announcement blog post Neo4j and AWS Neptune.

GQL resources

See the opengql GitHub organization (maintained by LDBC) for resources to implement GQL.

grammar: ANTLR Grammar and related content for GQL.
editor: GQL Code Editor.
railroad: Railroad diagrams for the GQL language

See also the GQL Parser prototype from 2021 by Olof Morra (TU Eindhoven)

Standardization process

Property Graph Standards, Process & Timing by Keith Hare
- 14th LDBC TUC (2021) – 🎥 recording
- 15th LDBC TUC (2022) – 🎥 recording
- 16th LDBC TUC (2023) – 🎥 recording
Pattern matching in GQL and SQL/PGQ by Leonid Libkin (2022) – 🎥 recording
The Upcoming GQL Standard by Stefan Plantikow (2021)
Towards GQL 1: Status report on the upcoming ISO/IEC graph query language standard by Stefan Plantikow (2021) – 🎥 recording
An overview of GQL by Petra Selmer (2022) – 🎥 recording
GQL 2.0: A technical manifesto by Alastair Green (2022) – 🎥 recording

Online Resources

Semantics

Graph Pattern Matching in GQL and SQL/PGQ (preprint, 2021; paper at SIGMOD 2022) by Alin Deutsch et al. See the related presentation by Leonid Libkin (ENS Paris): 📺 slides, 🎥 recording

Posts, talks, podcasts

SQL … and now GQL (2019) by Alastair Green
GQL and openCypher: the road ahead (2019) by Alastair Green
PostgreSQL, Oracle … graph query language standards adoption begins (2020) by Alastair Green
Alastair Green on GQL: the Graph Query Language – The Graph Show
- Query languages, Cypher, SQL/PGQ from 25:15 (~8 minutes)