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Databases and Programming: Two Subjects Divided by a Common Language?

Published: 14 January 2015 Publication History

Abstract

The 1990s saw a hugely productive interaction between database and programming language research. Ideas about type systems from programming languages played a central role in generalizing and adapting relational database systems to new data models. At the same time databases provided some of the best concrete examples of the application of concurrency theory and of the benefits of high-level optimization in functional programming languages. One of the driving ambitions behind this research was the idea that database access should be properly embedded in programming languages: one should not have to be bilingual in order to use a database from a programming language; and that goal has to some extent been realized.
In the past fifteen years, new data models, both for data storage and for data exchange have appeared with depressing regularity and with each such model, the inevitable query language. Does programming language research have anything to contribute to these new languages? Should we take the time to to worry about embedding these models in conventional languages? Over the same period, some interesting new connections between databases and programming languages have emerged, notably in the areas of scientific databases, annotation and provenance. Will this provide new opportunities for cross-fertilization?

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  1. Databases and Programming: Two Subjects Divided by a Common Language?

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    Published In

    cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices
    ACM SIGPLAN Notices  Volume 50, Issue 1
    POPL '15
    January 2015
    682 pages
    ISSN:0362-1340
    EISSN:1558-1160
    DOI:10.1145/2775051
    • Editor:
    • Andy Gill
    Issue’s Table of Contents
    • cover image ACM Conferences
      POPL '15: Proceedings of the 42nd Annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages
      January 2015
      716 pages
      ISBN:9781450333009
      DOI:10.1145/2676726
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 14 January 2015
    Published in SIGPLAN Volume 50, Issue 1

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