Lecture 4: Coursework Assignment Topics

1 October 2010

Presentation of the five coursework topics. Some good and bad examples of referencing. Requirements of preliminary report; investigation; and final report. Notes on working practices: aims of homework, exercises, coursework; avoiding plagiarism.

You need to commit to a topic choice by next Friday. This involves finding and reading references, as well as downloading, installing and running your chosen system. If you have difficulties with this, post a question below.

Links: Slides; Sheet; Coursework assignment; University marking scheme; Essay grade descriptors.


Lecture 20: Type-Checking for SQLizability

18 March 2010

Review of what LINQ can do in C# to lower the impedance mismatch between general-purpose programming languages and database query languages. Advantages and limitations on this; in particular the possibility of runtime failure, limits of abstraction, and the role of reflection.

One possible route to improving this: introduction of a type and effect system to track behaviour that cannot be represented in SQL. This allows arbitrary use of parametrization and higher-order functions, while providing compile-time guarantees of on-database execution. Outline of proof via a strongly-normalizing rewrite system. Several examples of how this more deeply embeds querying into a functional language, allowing modular construction of code and opening up queries to conventional compiler rewriting as well as SQL database-specific optimisations.

This lecture is based on the work of Ezra Cooper, in particular the following paper:

You can follow his research blog for more on this.

Homework

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APL13: Guest Lecture

21 February 2009

Database Programming without Tiers

Sam Lindley

Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science
School of Informatics
The University of Edinburgh

9am Monday 23 February 2009

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