The use of data type information in an interactive database environment

ABSTRACT

Despite the enormous advances that have been made in the specification of data types and data models in the fields of programming languages, databases and artificial intelligence; there remain a number of problems in attempting to unify the various approaches to the formal description of data. The purpose of this brief paper is to examine these problems from the point (or points) of view of those people—designers, administrators, applications programmers, and end-users—whose main interest is with databases. In particular, we hope to display special concern for the tools provided for the end-user, who should be the final beneficiary of whatever advances are made. In order to pin down some of these problems, it is worthwhile to attempt a definition of certain terms used in databases: 1. A data model (or database management system if one is describing an implementation) is a set of parameterized or “generic” data types. 2. A database schema is a set of data types that result from instantiating the generic types of the data model to produce a set of data types that describe the data to be stored. 3. A database is an instantiation of those types defined by a schema.

REFERENCES

• 1: Jean D. Ichbiah , Bernd Krieg-Brueckner , Brian A. Wichmann , John G. P. Barnes , Olivier Roubine , Jean-Claude Heliard, Rationale for the design of the Ada programming language, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, v.14 n.6b, p.1-261, June 1979 [doi>10.1145/956653.956654]
• 2: Joachim W. Schmidt, Some high level language constructs for data of type relation, ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS), v.2 n.3, p.247-261, Sept. 1977 [doi>10.1145/320557.320568]
• 3: Buneman, O. P., Root, D. J., and Menten L., "A CODASYL Interface for PASCAL and ADA," Moore School Report, University of Pennsylvania, August 1980.
• 4: CODASYL Data Base Task Group, April 1971 Report.
• 5: Wasserman, A. et al, "Report on the Programming Language PLAIN," TR-34, U.C., San Francisco, 1978.
• 6: Lawrence A. Rowe , Kurt A. Shoens, Data abstraction, views and updates in RIGEL, Proceedings of the 1979 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data, May 30-June 01, 1979, Boston, Massachusetts [doi>10.1145/582095.582107]
• 7: E. F. Codd, A relational model of data for large shared data banks, Communications of the ACM, v.13 n.6, p.377-387, June 1970 [doi>10.1145/362384.362685]
• 8: Peter Buneman , Robert E. Frankel, FQL: a functional query language, Proceedings of the 1979 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data, May 30-June 01, 1979, Boston, Massachusetts [doi>10.1145/582095.582104]
• 9: Milner, R. "A Theory of Type Polymorphism in Programming," J. Computer and System Sciences, Vol 17, 348-375, 1978.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.1 MODELS AND PRINCIPLES
      H.1.1 Systems and Information Theory
          Subjects: Information theory

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.2 DATABASE MANAGEMENT
      H.2.1 Logical Design
          Subjects: Data models

General Terms:
Management, Theory