Database Systems

Members of the Database Systems research group
© Foto: Valentin Marquardt

Welcome to the web presence of the Database Research Group at University of Tübingen.

Our group pursues a variety of “all-time classic” database research questions—prime examples include query language design, translation, and optimization—but with a few twists:

  • We are particularly interested in the design, compilation, and optimization of expressive database languages that support rich data models and embed seamlessly into host programming languages. This regularly leads us to explore the intersection of database and programming language technology.

  • Whenever insightful and promising, we apply techniques that have their roots in the programming languages community to the database research domain. This paves the way for expressive and elegant language-integrated queries, new query compilation techniques, and novel query optimization strategies.

We love to teach the basics as well as the intricacies of database systems. Courses on query and programming language technology are found in our repertoire as well.

Recent News

Recursive CTEs and DuckDB in Education (Torsten on the Disseminate Podcast)

Oct 16 2025

Torsten Grust

Jack Waudby invited Torsten to ramble about Recursive CTEs and DuckDB in Education in the DuckDB in Research series of the Disseminate Podcast. We cover USING KEY and also touch on WITH TRAMPOLINE. If you’ve got a spare 60 minutes …

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The DuckDB Explain Visualizer is now available!

Feb 26 2025

Denis Hirn

We are happy to announce the release of the DuckDB Explain Visualizer! It is a web-based tool that allows you to visualize the query plans of DuckDB. The DuckDB Explain Visualizer is available here: https://db.cs.uni-tuebingen.de/explain. …

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