TY - GEN
T1 - A domain theoretic approach to higher-order relations
AU - Buneman, Peter
AU - Ohori, Atsushi
N1 - Funding Information:
Much of this work was carried out while Peter Buneman was a visiting SERC research fellow at the University of Glasgow, Scotland and while Atsushi Ohori was on leave from OKI Electric Co., Japan. It was also supported by an NSF CER grant MCS82-19196.
Funding Information:
In this paper we will attempt to show that by exploiting a form of inheritance on objects rather than types, one can naturally provide a unifying framework for records, relations and other data types that are common in databases and at the same time relax the constraint that they are flat. Moreover, several of the basic ideas of relational database theory have a remarkably simple characterization within this framework. The concept of inheritance has been around for some time in programming languages [Gold80], databases t Much of this work was carried out while Peter Buneman was a visiting SERC research fellow at the University of Glasgow, Scotland and while Atsushi Ohori was on leave from OKI Electric Co., Japan. It was also supported by an NSF CER grant MCS82-19196.
Publisher Copyright:
© 1986, Springer-Verlag.
PY - 1986
Y1 - 1986
N2 - We have tried to show that the notion of inheritance leads to a natural representation of the operators of the relational algebra and that some of the basic properties of relational database theory, such as Armstrong's axioms, can be derived from some very simple domain theoretic relationships. If these ideas have any value one would expect to be able to represent other notions in database theory, such as multi-valued dependencies and the universal relation assumption within the same framework. However, given the apparent connection with Scott's “Information Systems”, a more pressing need is to work out a proper denotational semantics for relational databases. In the longer term we hope that it will be possible to use an approach such as this to produce better type systems for database programming languages.
AB - We have tried to show that the notion of inheritance leads to a natural representation of the operators of the relational algebra and that some of the basic properties of relational database theory, such as Armstrong's axioms, can be derived from some very simple domain theoretic relationships. If these ideas have any value one would expect to be able to represent other notions in database theory, such as multi-valued dependencies and the universal relation assumption within the same framework. However, given the apparent connection with Scott's “Information Systems”, a more pressing need is to work out a proper denotational semantics for relational databases. In the longer term we hope that it will be possible to use an approach such as this to produce better type systems for database programming languages.
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U2 - 10.1007/3-540-17187-8_31
DO - 10.1007/3-540-17187-8_31
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85035016127
SN - 9783540171874
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 91
EP - 104
BT - ICDT 1986 - International Conference on Database Theory, Proceedings
A2 - Ausiello, Giorgio
A2 - Atzeni, Paolo
PB - Springer Verlag
T2 - International Conference on Database Theory, ICDT 1986
Y2 - 8 September 1986 through 10 September 1986
ER -