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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Recommended Reading
Buneman P. and Frankel R.E. FQL – A Functional Query Language. In Proc. ACM SIGMOD Int. Conf. on Management of Data, 1979, pp. 52–58.
Nikhil R. An incremental, strongly-typed database language. Technical Report PhD Thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 1984.
Nikhil R. Practical polymorphism. In Proceedings of Functional Programming and Computer Architecture’85, LNCS 201. 1985, pp. 319–333.
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Gray, P.M.D. (2009). FQL. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_1108
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