FERRY: database-supported program execution

ABSTRACT

We demonstrate the language Ferry and its editing, compilation, and execution environment FerryDeck. Ferry's type system and operations match those of scripting or programming languages; its compiler has been designed to emit (bundles of) compliant and efficient SQL:1999 statements. Ferry acts as glue that permits a programming style in which developers access database tables using their programming language's own syntax and idioms -- the Ferry-expressible fragments of such programs may be executed by a relational database back-end, i.e., close to the data. The demonstrator FerryDeck implements compile-and-execute-as-you-type interactivity for Ferry and offers a variety of (graphical) hooks to explore and inspect this approach to database-supported program execution.

REFERENCES

• 1: ActiveRecord. http://ar.rubyonrails.org.
• 2: Torsten Grust , Sherif Sakr , Jens Teubner, XQuery on SQL hosts, Proceedings of the Thirtieth international conference on Very large data bases, p.252-263, August 31-September 03, 2004, Toronto, Canada
• 3: LinqPad. http://www.linqpad.net/.
• 4: Erik Meijer , Brian Beckman , Gavin Bierman, LINQ: reconciling object, relations and XML in the .NET framework, Proceedings of the 2006 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data, June 27-29, 2006, Chicago, IL, USA [doi>10.1145/1142473.1142552]
• 5: Simon Peyton Jones, Introduction, Journal of Functional Programming, v.13 n.1, p..1-6, January 2003 [doi>10.1017/S0956796803000315]
• 6: H J Schek , M H Scholl, The relational model with relation-valued attributes, Information Systems, v.11 n.2, p.137-147, 1986 [doi>10.1016/0306-4379(86)90003-7]
• 7: Simon Peyton Jones , Philip Wadler, Comprehensive comprehensions, Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN workshop on Haskell workshop, September 30-30, 2007, Freiburg, Germany [doi>10.1145/1291201.1291209]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.2 DATABASE MANAGEMENT
      H.2.3 Languages
          Subjects: Query languages

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.2 DATABASE MANAGEMENT
      H.2.3 Languages
          Subjects: Database (persistent) programming languages

General Terms:
Languages, Performance

Keywords:
ferry, linq, pathfinder, sql:1999