A Formal System for Reasoning about Programs Accessing a Relational Database

  • Authors:
  • Marco R. Casanova;Phillip A. Bernstein

  • Affiliations:
  • Departmento de Informática, Pontificia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, Rua Marquês de Sao Vincente, 225, 22.453, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil;Center for Research in Computing Technology, Aiken Computation Laboratory, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS)
  • Year:
  • 1980

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Abstract

A formal system for proving properties of programs accessing a database is introduced. Proving that a program preserves consistency of the database is one of the possible applications of the system. The formal system is a variant of dynamic logic and incorporates a data definition language (DDL) for describing relational databases and a data manipulation language (DML) whose programs access data in a database. The DDL is a many-sorted first-order language that accounts for data aggregations. The DML features a many-sorted assignment in place of the usual data manipulation statements, in addition to the normal programming language constructs.