RADICAL 2010: RADICAL 2010

May 10, 2010-May 11, 2010 in Cambridge, UK

About the Conference

RADICAL is a workshop on databases and programming languages, with an emphasis on connections between databases and recent advances in type systems and logics, especially dependent type systems incorporating data constraints.

We aim to cover significant recent developments in directions including (but not limited to) the following:

  • Language-integrated query mechanisms transform code in typed programming languages into forms suitable for efficient execution by relational database back-ends. Examples include the use of monads, pioneered in Haskell, in systems such as Microsoft LINQ, Links, and Ferry. Another example is SGL, a declarative language for massive multi-player games, which compiles to efficient relational queries.

  • Grammars, context free or regular, can be seen as types, and hence allow textual data to be imported into typed data models (as in PADS, various XML systems, and Microsoft’s M Grammar).

  • Information flow type systems, developed in the area of language-based security, are starting to be applied to database systems, for example, to help track data provenance, confidentiality, and integrity.

  • Systems of dependent types including data constraints (as in eg Z, VDM, etc) have long been able to express database integrity constraints, but with recent advances in automation (eg SMT solvers) typecheckers can now verify statically that queries and updates respect these constraints.

  • The dream of verified software stacks is starting to come true, thanks in no small part to advanced type systems found in interactive proof assistants. Recent work on verified implementations of database systems starts to address the correctness question for database implementations.

  • Workflow and database systems are essential components of many enterprises, but often have difficulties interoperating. Ideas such as temporal logic from the verification community are being imported into databases to help monitor and verify the interactions between workflows and databases.

  • Finally, according to many metrics SQL is not just the most successful declarative language of the 1970s but of all time. But SQL is indeed a creation of the 1970s and since then research on declarative languages and type systems in particular has made much progress. Many researchers share the dream of eventually replacing SQL with a higher-level, safer, easier-to-use database programming language. We see the research directions covered by RADICAL 2010 as steps toward this dream.

Conference Dates

Submissions: April 1, 2010
Event: May 10, 2010-May 11, 2010

Proceedings