Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from October, 2012

Formalisation of Tables in a Dependent Language

I've had an idea kicking about in my head for a while of making query plans explicit in SQL in such a way that one can be assured that the query plan corresponds to the SQL statement desired. The idea is something like a Curry-Howard in a relational setting. One could infer the plan from the SQL, the SQL from the plan, or do a sort of "type-checking" to make sure that the plan corresponds to the SQL. The devil is always in the details however. When I started looking at the primitives that I would need, it turns out that the low level table joining operations are actually not that far from primitive SQL statement themselves. I decided to go ahead and formalise some of what would be necessary in Agda in order get a better feel for the types of objects I would need and the laws which would be required to demonstrate that a plan corresponded with a statement. Dependent types are very powerful and give you plenty of rope to hang yourself. It's always something