Relational lenses: a language for updatable views

  • Authors:

  • Aaron Bohannon;Benjamin C. Pierce;Jeffrey A. Vaughan

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Pennsylvania;University of Pennsylvania;University of Pennsylvania

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the twenty-fifth ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGART symposium on Principles of database systems
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

We propose a novel approach to the classical view update problem. The view update problem arises from the fact that modifications to a database view may not correspond uniquely to modifications on the underlying database; we need a means of determining an "update policy" that guides how view updates are reflected in the database. Our approach is to define a bi-directional query language, in which every expression can be read bot(from left to right) as a view definition and (from right to left) as an update policy. The primitives of this language are based on standard relational operators. Its type system, which includes record-level predicates and functional dependencies, plays a crucial role in guaranteeing that update policies are well-behaved, in a precise sense, and that they are total—i.e., able to handle arbitrary changes to the view.