Rel: A Programming Language for Relational Data

[Yuri de Wit]

Today I came across an interesting paper [1] that I thought was worth sharing. It introduces Rel, a new relational language designed to model entire enterprise applications.

It seems to me there’s potentially an overlapping vision here for representing knowledge and transformations. At the very least, it’s a valuable reference.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.10323v1

[Ryan Wisnesky]

Rel is cool, and everyone converges on first-order logic for a reason. Both Rel and CQL extend datalog, etc. CQL chooses its fragment for data integration purposes rather than query, which is one difference with Rel.

But what we see in the market is, for example, Rel running on Snowflake, rather than the reverse - far more demand for a new SQL system (Snowflake) than for programming systems that are better than SQL (Rel, etc). And fifty years after the invention of SQL, it’s unclear if that situation is because of SQL or because of the actual real-world problems people need solved.

Thanks for sending this along!

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