The essence of language-integrated query

James Cheney, Sam Lindley, Philip Wadler. Draft paper, 1 December 2012, revised 29 March 2013.
Language-integrated query is receiving renewed attention, in part because of its support through Microsoft’s LINQ framework. We present a simple theory of language-integrated query based on quotation and normalisation of quoted terms. Our technique supports abstraction over queries, dynamic generation of queries, and queries with nested intermediate data. Higher-order features prove useful even for dynamic generation of first-order queries. We prove that normalisation always succeeds in translating any query of flat relation type to SQL. We present experimental results confirming our technique works, even in situations where Microsoft’s LINQ framework either fails to produce an SQL query or, in one case, produces an avalanche of SQL queries.

Speaker Details

Philip Wadler is Professor of Theoretical Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh. He is an ACM Fellow and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, served as Chair of ACM SIGPLAN, and is a past holder of a Royal Society-Wolfson Research Merit Fellowship. Previously, he worked or studied at Stanford, Xerox Parc, CMU, Oxford, Chalmers, Glasgow, Bell Labs, and Avaya Labs, and visited as a guest professor in Copenhagen, Sydney, and Paris. He has an h-index of 59, with more than 17,500 citations to his work according to Google Scholar. He is a winner of the POPL Most Influential Paper Award, has contributed to the designs of Haskell, Java, and XQuery, and is a co-author of Introduction to Functional Programming (Prentice Hall, 1988), XQuery from the Experts (Addison Wesley, 2004) and Generics and Collections in Java (O’Reilly, 2006). He has delivered invited talks in locations ranging from Aizu to Zurich.

Series:
Microsoft Research Talks
Date:
Speakers:
Philip Wadler
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh

Series: Microsoft Research Talks