SQL in accessing and cleaning semistructured data

A key step in the democratization of analytics is the democratization of Extract Load Transform (ELT). Democratization depends on SQL as SQL is the most well-known, declarative language. Indeed, SQL adoption increases in areas that were not considered the traditional domain of SQL; a new class of users, often called analytics engineers, are enabled to SQL their way into areas that were previously inaccessible to them. However, further adoption requires the resolution of additional technical problems. We survey recent advances and discuss open problems in (a) querying and transforming semistructured data with SQL and (b) SQL materialized views as a mechanism for deriving clean data.