A Functional Database Phil Trinder D.Phil. Thesis Wolfson College Michaelmas Term, 1989 This thesis explores the use of functional languages to implement, manipulate and query databases. Implementing databases. A functional language is used to construct a database manager that allows efficient and concurrent access to shared data. In contrast to the locking mechanism found in conventional databases, the functional database uses data dependency to provide exclusion. Results obtained from a prototype database demonstrate that data dependency permits an unusual degree of concurrency between operations on the data. The prototype database is used to exhibit some problems that seriously restrict concurrency and also to demonstrate the resolution of these problems using a new primitive. The design of a more realistic database is outlined. Some restrictions on the data structures that can be used in a functional database are also uncovered. Manipulating databases. Functions over the database a...

Research into providing support for long term data in lazy functional programming systems is presented in this thesis. The motivation for this work has been to reap the benefits of integrating lazy functional programming languages and persistence. The benefits are . the programmer need not write code to support long term data since this is provided as part of the programming system . persistent data can be used in a type safe way since the programming language type system applies to data with the whole range of persistence . the benefits of lazy evaluation are extended to the full lifetime of a data value. Whilst data is reachable, any evaluation performed on the data persists. A data value changes monotonically from an unevaluated state towards a completely evaluated state over time. . interactive data intensive applications such as functional databases can be developed. These benefits are realised by the development of models for persistence in lazy functional programming systems. Tw...