[database-devel] Welcome to database-devel!

[Jeff Davis]

On Mon, 2012-05-07 at 06:56 -0700, Greg Weber wrote:
> I worked with a student to lay out a vision for type-safe database
> access in a GSoC proposal [1].
> I have little interest in the SQL variant at the moment, but plan on
> making a MongoDB version when I get a free weekend, which may not be
> until after I am done mentoring GSoC projects.

I come from the postgresql world, and my perspective is that Haskell is,
loosely speaking, the language that SQL should be. SQL is statically
typed with lazy evaluation, type inference, immutable state, controlled
side effects. It's just, well, ugly, and the type system is a little
squishy in some ways, and it has NULLs. All things that haskell can fix.

However, I strongly caution haskellers to understand an actual SQL
system like postgresql before embarking on a project like this. I've
spent a lot of time thinking about how database systems should be, and
their relationship to applications, and it's complicated.

One thing that I've decided is vitally important is that the database
system needs first-class support for all of the types that the
application is concerned with -- and I don't mean just ints and strings
and timestamps -- I mean _all_ of the interesting types.

Although haskell is, in some ways, at the forefront of type systems, I
believe that a DBMS offers new challenges that you may not have
encountered before. For instance, you need to deal with data
representation issues, index support, query optimization, and the fact
that you have a running system that you are sending code fragments to
(What about adding new types while the system is up? How does that
affect the type resolution of other queries already present in other
binaries?).

I strongly encourage the haskell community to take a closer look at a
system like postgresql, where you can see how pervasive types are and
why they are important to a DBMS.

Regards,
	Jeff Davis