Updating Complex Value Databases

Abst ract Query languages and their optimizations have been a very important issue in the database community. Languages for updating databases, however, have not been studied to the same extent, although they are clearly important since databases must change over time. The structure and expressiveness of updates is largely dependent on the data model. In relational databases, for example, the update language typically allows the user to specify changes to individual elds of a subset of a relation that meets some selection criterion. The syntax is terse, specifying only the pieces of the database that are to be altered. Because of its simplicity, most of the optimizations take place in the internal processing of the update rather than at the language level. In complex value databases, the need for a terse and optimizable update language is much greater, due to the deeply nested structures involved. Starting with a query language for complex value databases called the Collection Programming Language (CPL), we describe an extension called CPL+ which provides a convenient and intuitive speciica-tion of updates on complex values. CPL is a functional language, with powerful optimizations achieved through rewrite rules. Additional rewrite rules are derived for CPL+ and a notion of \deltaacation" is introduced to transform complete updates, expressed as conventional CPL expressions, into equivalent update expressions in CPL+. As a result of applying these transformations, the performance of complex updates can increase substantially.