2026/07/29 by Yisu Remy Wang, Paul Talma
Computer Science · #cs.DB
arxiv created 2026/07/29 · arxiv updated 2026/07/30
We revisit Tarski's Algebra of Relations (TAR), an old formalism of relations predating Codd's relational algebra by over 100 years, as a new foundation for relational databases. We argue TAR provides a better abstraction at both the semantic level and the physical level, in the context of modern application code and system architecture. To demonstrate the strengths of TAR, we design and implement Prela, a compositional and controllable query language, and show that queries written in Prela are concise, clear, and efficient.