Database hosting in strongly-typed programming languages

• Published in: ACM Transactions on Database Systems
• Main Authors: Bever, Martin, Lockemann, Peter C.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) 1985
• Subjects: DML
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3148.3327; https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3148.3327

Database system support has become an essential part of many computer applications, which have extended beyond the more traditional commercial applications to, among others, engineering applications. Correspondingly, application programming with the need to access databases has progressively shifted to scientifically oriented languages. Modern developments in these languages are characterized by advanced mechanisms for the liberal declaration of data types, for type checking, and facilities for modularization of large programs. The present paper examines how a DBMS can be accessed from such a language in a way that conforms to its syntax and utilizes its type-checking facilities, without modifying the language specification itself, and hence its compilers. The basic idea is to rely on facilities for defining modules as separately compilable units, and to use these to declare user-defined abstract data types. The idea is demonstrated by an experiment in which a specific DBMS (ADABAS) is hosted in the programming language (LIS). The paper outlines a number of approaches and their problems, shows how to embed the DML into LIS, and how a more user-oriented DML can be provided in LIS.