Strongly-Normalizing Higher-Order Relational Queries

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract / Description of output

Language-integrated query is a powerful programming construct allowing database queries and ordinary program code to interoperate seamlessly and safely. Language-integrated query techniques rely on classical results about the nested relational calculus, stating that its queries can be algorithmically translated to SQL, as long as their result type is a flat relation. Cooper and others advocated higher-order nested relational calculi as a basis for language-integrated queries in functional languages such as Links and F#. However, the translation of higher-order relational queries to SQL relies on a rewrite system for which no strong normalization proof has been published: a previous proof attempt does not deal correctly with rewrite rules that duplicate subterms. This paper fills the gap in the literature, explaining the difficulty with a previous proof attempt, and showing how to extend the ⊤⊤-lifting approach of Lindley and Stark to accommodate duplicating rewrites. We also show how to extend the proof to a recently-introduced calculus for heterogeneous queries mixing set and multiset semantics.

Original languageEnglish
Article number23
Pages (from-to)23:1-23:41
Number of pages41
JournalLogical Methods in Computer Science
Volume18
Issue number3
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 17 Aug 2022

Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)

  • Strong normalization
  • ⊤⊤-lifting
  • Nested relational calculus
  • Language-integrated query

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