In this paper we study the expressive power of query languages for nested bags. We define the ambient bag language by generalizing the constructs of the relational language of Breazu-Tannen, Buneman and Wong, which is known to have precisely the power of the nested relational algebra. Relative strength of additional polynomial constructs is studied, and the ambient language endowed with the strongest combination of those constructs is chosen as a candidate for the basic bag language, which is called BQL (Bag Query Language). We prove that achieveing the power of BQL in the relational language amounts to adding simple arithmetic to the latter. We show that BQL has shortcomings of the relational algebra: it can not express recursive queries. In particular, parity test is not definable in BQL. We consider augmenting BQL with powerbag and structural recursion to overcome this deficiency. In contrast to the relational case, where powerset and structural recursion are equivalent...

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. Two lower bag domain constructions are introduced: the initial construction which gives free lower monoids, and the final construction which is defined explicitly in terms of second order functions. The latter is analyzed closely. For sober dcpo's, the elements of the final lower bag domains can be described concretely as bags. For continuous domains, initial and final lower bag domains coincide. They are continuous again and can be described via a basis which is constructed from a basis of the argument domain. The lower bag domain construction preserves algebraicity and the properties I and M, but does not preserve bounded completeness, property L, or bifiniteness. 1 Introduction Power domain constructions [13, 15, 16] were introduced to describe the denotational semantics of non-deterministic programming languages. A power domain construction is a domain constructor P , which maps domains to domains, together with some families of continuous operations. If X is the semantic domain ...

Powerdomains like mixes, sandwiches, snacks and scones are typically used to provide semantics of collections of descriptions of partial data. In particular, they were used to give semantics of databases with partial information. In this paper we argue that to be able to put these constructions into the context of a programming language it is necessary to characterize them as free (ordered) algebras. Two characterizations -- for mixes and snacks -- are already known, and in the first part of the paper we give characterizations for scones and sandwiches and provide an alternative characterization of snacks. The algebras involved have binary and unary operations and relatively simple equational theories. We then define a new construction, which is in essence all others put together (hence called salad) and give its algebraic characterization. It is also shown how all algebras considered in the paper are related in a natural way, that is, in a way that corresponds to embeddings of their p...

This paper is a summary of the following six publications: (1) Stable Power Domains [Hec94d] (2) Product Operations in Strong Monads [Hec93b] (3) Power Domains Supporting Recursion and Failure [Hec92] (4) Lower Bag Domains [Hec94a] (5) Probabilistic Domains [Hec94b] (6) Probabilistic Power Domains, Information Systems, and Locales [Hec94c] After a general introduction in Section 0, the main results of these six publications are summarized in Sections 1 through 6. 0 Introduction In this section, we provide a common framework for the summarized papers. In Subsection 0.1, Moggi's approach to specify denotational semantics by means of strong monads is introduced. In Subsection 0.2, we specialize this approach to languages with a binary choice construct. Strong monads can be obtained in at least two ways: as free constructions w.r.t. algebraic theories (Subsection 0.3), and by using second order functions (Subsection 0.4). Finally, formal definitions of those concepts which are used in all...

this report as a basis for investigating aggregate functions.

In this paper we study the expressive power of query languages for nested bags. We define the ambient bag language by generalizing the constructs of the relational language of Breazu-Tannen, Buneman and Wong, which is known to have precisely the power of the nested relational algebra. Relative strength of additional polynomial constructs is studied, and the ambient language endowed with the strongest combination of those constructs is chosen as a candidate for the basic bag language, which is called BQL (Bag Query Language). We prove that achieveing the power of BQL in the relational language amounts to adding simple arithmetic to the latter. We show that BQL has shortcomings of the relational algebra: it can not express recursive queries. In particular, parity test is not definable in BQL. We consider augmenting BQL with powerbag and structural recursion to overcome this deficiency. In contrast to the relational case, where powerset and structural recursion are equivalent...