User Defined Functions (UDFs) in databases

User Defined Functions (UDFs) in databases: An overview of recent approaches on how to embed UDFs into relational database systems, with special emphasis on my team’s work on the YeSQL language and system, optimizing processing of Python-based UDFs inside SQL, the universal standard database language. 

Bio: Yannis Ioannidis is a Professor of Informatics & Telecom at the University of Athens, Greece since 1997. Prior to that, he was a Professor of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1986–1997. He has also served as the President and General Director of ATHENA, the only research & innovation center in Greece focusing exclusively on information technologies (2011–2021).

His research interests include database and information systems, data science, data and text analytics, scalable data processing, recommender systems and personalization, and digital storytelling. His work is often multidisciplinary, motivated by problems that arise in the Life, Physical, or Social Sciences, the Humanities, and the Arts. He has published over 160 articles, holds three patents, and has co-founded one start-up based on the results of his group’s research.

Ioannidis is an ACM and IEEE Fellow (both essentially "for contributions to database systems, particularly query optimization"), a member of Academia Europaea, and a recipient of several research and teaching awards, including the Presidential Young Investigator Award, the UW Chancellor's Teaching Award, a VLDB 10-Year Best Paper Award, and the Xanthopoulos-Pnevmatikos Award on Outstanding University Teaching (presented by the President of Greece).

He has been leading OpenAIRE—the open access infrastructure in Europe—for over a decade and serves on the Advisory Board of the new Destination Earth initiative, the Executive Board of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures, and the Steering Committee of the IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering.

An ACM member since 1983, he has served as ACM Secretary/Treasurer (2018–2020), SIGMOD (SIG on Management of Data) Chair (2009–2013) and Vice-Chair (2005–2009), and as a member of the ACM Europe Council, the SIG Governing Board Executive Committee, and the ACM Publications Board. Currently he serves on the ACM Digital Library Board, is a CACM Associate Editor, the faculty advisor of the ACM Student Chapter of his university and will chair the ACM Europe Council Working Group on Summer Schools, having organized the Council’s first three summer schools on the topic of Data Science. In 2017, he received the ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award.