Databases conferences in 2025

In 2025, both top-tier database conferences will be in Europe: SIGMOD in Berlin (June 22–27) and VLDB in London (September 1–5). There are quite a few papers and satellite events I am looking forward to – I listed them below.

SIGMOD 2025

The papers presented at SIGMOD are listed on the website: research track, industry track.

Update: the detailed programme is out!

Keynotes:

• How to Build a Brain by Christos H. Papadimitriou
• The Case for Collaboration (Everything a Database Person really needs to know about Machine Learning) by Margo Seltzer
• Fifty Years of Transaction Processing Research by Phil Bernstein

Graphs

• The GRADES-NDA 2025 workshop on Friday

  • BARQ: A Vectorized SPARQL Query Execution Engine by Simon Grätzer, Lars Heling, and Pavel Klinov

• How DuckDB is USING KEY to Unlock Recursive Query Performance by Björn Bamberg, Denis Hirn, and Torsten Grust

• Revisiting Graph Analytics Benchmarks by Lingkai Meng et al. The authors analyze the LDBC Graphalytics benchmark and propose several improvements to both the graph generator and the benchmark suite. The work described in this paper seems to be the implementation of the research agenda outlined at the 16th LDBC TUC meeting (see the slides and the talk recording for more details).

• Rel: A Programming Language for Relational Data by Molham Aref et al.

• RedTAO: A Trillion-edge High-throughput Graph Store by Shihao Zhou et al.

• Entity/Relationship Graphs by Philipp Skavantzos and Sebastian Link: graph schema work, closely related to what LDBC LEX is working on.

• User-Centric Property Graph Repairs by Amedeo Pachera, Angela Bonifati, and Andrea Mauri: more graph work!

• Schema-Based Query Optimisation for Graph Databases by Chandan Sharma, Pierre Genevès, Nils Gesbert, and Nabil Layaïda

• Dynamic Pruning for Recursive Joins by Norifumi Nishikawa et al.

• Graph-Based Vector Search: An Experimental Evaluation of the State-of-the-Art by Ilias Azizi, Karima Echihabi, and Themis Palpanas

• GES: High-Performance Graph Processing Engine and Service in Huawei by Sen Gao et al.

• A Modular Graph-Native Query Optimization Framework by Bingqing Lyu et al.

• TigerVector: Supporting Vector Search in Graph Databases for Advanced RAGs by Shige Liu et al.

• Table Overlap Estimation through Graph Embeddings by Francesco Pugnaloni et al.

• Lossless Transformation of Knowledge Graphs to Property Graphs using Standardized Schemas by Kashif Rabbani et al.

Benchmarks

• A Benchmark for Data Management in Microservices by Rodrigo Laigner et al.

Misc

• Streaming Democratized: Ease Across the Latency Spectrum with Delayed View Semantics and Snowflake Dynamic Tables by Daniel Sotolongo et al. The paper, co-authored by former CWI colleague Ilaria Battiston, describes incremental view maintenance techniques used in Snowflake along with operational experiences.

• Pruning in Snowflake: Working Smarter, Not Harder by Andreas Zimmerer et al.

• AutoComp: Automated Data Compaction for Log-Structured Tables in Data Lakes by Anja Gruenheid et al.

• Databricks Lakeguard: Supporting fine-grained access control and multi-user capabilities for Apache Spark workloads by Martin Grund et al.

• Unity Catalog: Open and Universal Governance for the Lakehouse and Beyond by Ramesh Chandra et al.

• MicroNN: An On-device Disk-resident Updatable Vector Database by Jeffrey Pound et al.

VLDB 2025

Satellite events

• The TPCTC 2025 workshop on Monday

• The LSGDA 2025 workshop on Friday

• The 20th LDBC TUC meeting on Saturday, which I am co-organizing with the LDBC Board of Directors

Papers

The papers presented will be published in PVLDB’s Volume 18, which is being filled up on a rolling basis:

• Chimera: A system design of dual storage and traversal-join unified query processing for SQL/PGQ by Geonho Lee et al.

• There are a few papers under revision that will be interest. I’ll keep updating this list in the coming weeks as the programme finalizes.