Definition
At about the same time that Shipman was developing DAPLEX, Buneman and Frankel proposed the highly influential FQL functional query language [1], based on Backus’s FP functional programming paradigm. A major motivation for this work was that it is in principle possible to combine arbitrary computable functions with stored database functions into a functional query language which is not limited to a predefined set of operators.
FQL was intended for implementation over existing DBMSs and an abstract implementation based on the lazy evaluation of stream data was described. In later publications [2, 3], FQL was extended with features from the functional programming language ML. In this version, function definition is simpler than in the variable-free FP-like syntax and new higher-order functions can be defined in addition to the built-in ones. Also a set of built-in metalevel functions is provided, as in EFDM. Thus, object-level querying and meta level querying can be carried...
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Buneman P, Frankel RE. FQL – a functional query language. In: Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data; 1979. p. 52–8.
Nikhil R. An incremental, strongly-typed database language. Technical report PhD thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 1984.
Nikhil R. Practical polymorphism. In: Proceedings of the Functional Programming and Computer Architecture; 1985. p. 319–33.
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Gray, P.M.D. (2018). FQL. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_1108
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_1108
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