Incremental relational lenses

Abstract

Lenses are a popular approach to bidirectional transformations, a generalisation of the view update problem in databases, in which we wish to make changes to source tables to effect a desired change on a view . However, perhaps surprisingly, lenses have seldom actually been used to implement updatable views in databases. Bohannon, Pierce and Vaughan proposed an approach to updatable views called relational lenses , but to the best of our knowledge this proposal has not been implemented or evaluated to date. We propose incremental relational lenses , that equip relational lenses with change-propagating semantics that map small changes to the view to (potentially) small changes to the source tables. We also present a language-integrated implementation of relational lenses and a detailed experimental evaluation, showing orders of magnitude improvement over the non-incremental approach. Our work shows that relational lenses can be used to support expressive and efficient view updates at the language level, without relying on updatable view support from the underlying database.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Jul 30, 2018
Source ID
10.1145/3236769

Entities

People

  • James Cheney
  • Roly Perera
  • Rudi Horn

Organizations

  • Air Force Office of Scientific Research
  • Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
  • European Research Council
  • University of Edinburgh

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Database Systems and Applications
  • Theoretical Analysis.
  • Vision Science/Vision Psychology/Cognitive Neuroscience.