2014, December 12
Viewpoints are a concept that I have only mentionned in passing in try-alf's first post. They certainly deserve more thoughts: while very simple you'll be amazed by their power. In short, viewpoints are to databases (variables) what views are to relations (variables). If the last sentence sounds cryptic, just read on! To keep this post self-contained, I need to start with some basic material on views before moving on to context-awareness and database viewpoints. A general comment before starting: don't get abused by the taste of triviality; simplicity, sometimes, is that simple.
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2014, December 3
In short, probably something like this:
suppliers
| join shipments # From suppliers and their shipments
| where @city = "London" # among those located in London
| select @sid, @pid, @name, @qty # select the ids, supplier name and shipped qty
Before explaining this syntax, why it matters (does it?), and the advantages it has, let me explain the motivation of this work. (If you are intrigued by the functional stuff in the title and want the explanation right away, you can simply skip the next section.)
(This is the first of a - I hope long - series of posts on the design of a data manipulation language. Keep in touch by following me on twitter or asking by email to be notified when next essays appear.)
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2013, October 21
I'm happy to announce that Alf Alf 0.15.0 has
just been released and with it, this web site! I've been thinking about all of
this for many years, often as a cross-cutting concern in my (other) research
work. I've been
hacking on Alf in particular during my free time for more than two years now.
I think it was time to share it in a slightly more official way than as an
(almost invisible) open-source research
prototype on github. Recent personal events gave
it a serious boost and a few people convinced me to give it more visibility.
So here we go.
Alf is a modern, powerful implementation of relational algebra. It brings
relational algebra where you don't necessarily expect it: in shell, in
scripting and for building complex software. Alf has an rich set of features.
Among them, it allows you to:
- Query .json, .csv, .yaml files and convert from one format to the other with
ease,
- Query SQL databases with a sounder and more powerful query language than SQL
itself,
- Export structured and so-called "semi-structured" query results in various
exchange formats,
- Query multiple data sources as if they were one and only one database,
- Create database viewpoints (mostly read-only viewpoints for now), to
provide your users with a true database interface while keeping them away
from data they may not have access to,
- Enjoy a rich set of relational operators and even define your own
high-level and domain-specific ones.
Alf is very young and not all of the advanced features are stable and/or
documented. I plan to spend some time in the next weeks and months to work on
them, so stay tuned. In the mean time, you can play with Alf on this website,
install Alf 0.15.0 and start playing with it
on your own datasets and databases, in shell or
in ruby. I'll come with advanced material on this
blog as soon as possible, I promise.
The rest of this post explains the context of this work and why it exists in
the first place, in the form of a (very accessible) scientific paper (this
writing style is also a test, let me know what you think). The following
section provides a short overview of the proposed approach,
explaining the title of this blog post. We then detail Alf's proposal, first
with a short example illustrating the advantages compared to
existing solutions, then with a more theoretical presentation
covering three main questions:
why true relational algebra?,
what type system to expose?, and
why not classes and objects?.
Alf's limitations and features to come are then
briefly discussed, before concluding.
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