Abstract: Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on computer storage media, for processing database system processes seismic wave data using database queries. The seismic wave data is obtained from sensors of a reflection seismology survey. The seismic wave data is distributed among nodes of the parallel processing database system. Computations of processing the seismic wave data are performed using relational database queries that execute on the nodes in parallel. These computations performed by the queries include generating a starting Earth model of an area surveyed, and performing iterations of solving a forward problem of generating seismic wave patterns from the starting Earth model, performing local optimization that modifies the starting Earth model, and providing the modified Earth model as input to the forward problem in a next iteration.