The Database Programming and Query Language DBPQL

Object-oriented programming is considered advantageous to other programming paradigms. It provides more flexibility, simplifies development and maintenance, better models real-world situations, and is widely popular in large-scale software engineering. While programming languages focus on processing, database systems are built to support large bodies of application programs that share data. In order to utilise the combined power of programming languages and SQL-like query languages, research has focused on the embedded and integrated approaches. While embedded approaches are more popular, they suffer from the impedance mismatch. This situation worsens when considering the numerous conceptual and technical difficulties that are often encountered when a relational database system is being used by a program that is written in an object-oriented language.
Our research focuses on the integration of object-oriented programming languages, database query languages, and traditional database concepts. We investigate the stack-based approach to database programming and querying. The major initial objectives of our research are to:

• Develop a database architecture that is suitable to integrate database programming languages, object-oriented programming and more traditional database system features;
• Propose an intermediate-level database programming and querying language that combines the advantages of object-oriented programming and database querying languages. Before such a powerful language design can be achieved, a number of conceptual and technical challenges have to be investigated;
• Define a suitable run-time environment, which permits an efficient and effective evaluation of such an integrated language in a distributed database environment; and
• Provide proof of concept implementations.