Beyond SQL: AI for Complex Data Management
Objectives
There has been a tremendous amount of work in the space of converting natural language to SQL queries. While this work is very valuable to business users, enterprise data management has many complex uses of SQL that are less actively covered by current work. Examples are querying structured and unstructured data, knowledge graphs, property graphs, performing extract load transform workloads, remediating complex SQL queries as application demands change, etc. As AI is increasingly used to transform simpler querying workloads, there is an opportunity to apply them in these other aspects of data management. We aim to bring together researchers exploring these diverse topics together to promote cross-fertilization and sharing of techniques that may transfer well from one domain to the other.
Format
Beyond SQL will be held as a half-day workshop at ICDE 2026. The proceedings of all workshops will be published jointly alongside with the conference proceedings.
The workshop accepts regular research papers and industrial papers of the following types:
- Full research papers: up to 8 pages + references (no appendix)
- Short paper: up to 4 pages + references (no appendix)
- Extended abstract papers: up to 2 pages + references (no appendix)
Call for Papers
Audience: Our workshop encourages participation from researchers in data management, AI, natural language processing, vision and semantic web working on a wide range of problems relevant to these topics. We hope that this will constitute a single reference point for the researchers and practitioners working in that area and help form new collaborations. We also aim to provide a venue for researchers from industry and practitioners present use cases and discuss their needs in addressing real-world problems and large-scale solutions especially with respect to newer topics such as data products.
Topics of Interest include but are not limited to:
- ETL/ELT workload processing
- SQL remediation
- SQL extensions
- Structuring unstructured data at scale
- Querying other structured data (RDF graphs, property graphs, JSON).
- Linking structured and unstructured data at scale
- Creation of data products
- Data governance and data contracts
- SQL editing for changing application requirements
- From data to report generation, hypothesis testing
- Benchmarks on any of the topics above
Novelty: Submissions must present original work that has not been previously published or accepted at any other conference or workshop. Contributions should demonstrate substantial novelty and provide meaningful advancement beyond prior work.
Dates
| Deadline | |
|---|---|
| Paper Submission | February 16th, 2026 |
| Notification of acceptance: | March 2nd, 2026 |
| Camera-ready copy due: | March 9th, 2026 |
| Workshop day: | May 4th, 2026 |
| ICDE Main Conference: | May 5-8th, 2026 |
Submissions
Submissions will be submitted over OpenReview and will be reviewed in a single-anonymous manner.
Submit your paper at: https://openreview.net/group?id=IEEE.org/ICDE/2026/Workshop/Beyond_SQL
Template: Manuscripts must be prepared in accordance with the IEEE format that is also used for the main ICDE conference.
Conference Program
Invited Speakers:
-
Reynold Cheng (University of Hong Kong (HKU))
-
Aditya Parameswaran (University of California, Berkeley)
Organization
For questions, please contact: solashirai(at)ibm.com
Beyond SQL is organized by:
- Oktie Hassanzadeh (IBM Research)
- Kavitha Srinivas (IBM Research)
- Liane Vogel (TU Darmstadt)
- Sola Shirai (IBM Research)
- Liana Patel (Stanford University)
Program Committee
- Alon Halevy (Google Cloud)
- Haonan Wang (Columbia University)
- Paolo Papotti (EURECOM)
- Madelon Hulsebos (CWI)
- Jan-Micha Bodensohn (TU Darmstadt)
- Makbule Gulcin Ozsoy (Neo4j)