I am wondering about.. SQL as a declarative structured query language that can be optimized into essentially any kind of distributed, directed acyclic graph of processing - vs the special characteristics of relational databases (relational algebra, relvars, etc. etc.) is an important distinction as - of yet, I see the author linking both together so I'm trying to understand what it is about relational structures that specifically helped here (just not seeing it yet, not that it isn't there).
Also, wondering if ISO/IEC 9075-15:2023 SQL standard for multidimensional arrays (MDA) is of any use here? Paper describing SQL/MDA here [2].
[1] https://madlib.apache.org/documentation.html
[2] https://www.ifis.uni-luebeck.de/~moeller/Lectures/WS-19-20/N...
WRT ISO/IEC 9075-15:2023: This is the standard established from rasdaman, IIUC. I reject this approach (which treats arrays as a column type), and instead adopt one inspired by Michael Stonebraker's SciDB (which treats arrays as tables themselves). For an in depth review of the topic, I recommend this NSF paper: https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10545560
Mathematically, einsum and database joins are the same thing, just over different semirings (real numbers for einsum, booleans for databases). A lot of papers about datalog explore this sort of thing in more depth. In particular, Dyna[1] might be interesting.
[0]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22614 [1]: https://dyna.org/
Jokes aside, sounds really impressive, though I only understood about 10% :D
basically it comes down to using relational algebra as the IR, letting a database optimizer reason about tensor programs
You’re spot on. I think that SQL, as a data oriented and logic PL, might be ideal for writing tensor programs.