From Ingres Community Wiki

Introduction

In their book Databases, Types, and the Relational Model, The Third Manifesto, (TTM), Hugh Darwen and C.J. Date revisit database technology. The book addresses the foundations of database technology and presents a rigorous treatment of the subject. Among other things it provides a description to which conforming language(s) must adhere. In order to make the discussion concrete the authors present such a conforming language: Tutorial D. C.J. Date uses Tutorial D in his other publications. At Ingres we thought it was time to provide an Ingres implementation.

Project D is a research project that will provide a native implementation in Ingres of the Tutorial D language. It is worth pointing out that the novel type system proposed in TTM and the temporal system proposed in Temporal Data and the Relational Model will also be implemented. The result will be of interest to all educational institutions wishing to teach database fundamentals firmly based on clear theoretical foundations.

Project D will add the fully compliant D language, Tutorial D, to Ingres (in addition to SQL and QUEL). This will combine an enterprise strength open source DBMS with recent research work being carried out at the two main contributing Universities. See "Open Source Meets Academia". The intention is to produce a true relational database management system that can be used as such but will also still be able to operate in SQL mode.

Project D Subcomponents

There are currently two main parts to Project D: Parser and Functionality. The Parser is the user visible aspect of the project and converts Tutorial D statements into the Ingres internal format ready for optimization and execution. The Functionality is concerned with those aspects of TTM which are not currently addressed by the Ingres engine.

Open Source Meets Academia

This project has been made possible largely because Ingres is an Open Source project, which fosters collaboration in a community. Much of the work on Project D is being carried out by the Department of Computer Science at the University of Warwick and the Fakultät Für Informatik Und Automatisierung at the Technical University of Imenau.

At Warwick research into efficient solutions to outstanding relational issues is being carried out with a view to implementing the results in the Ingres DBMS.

At Ilmenau work has begun on creating a Tutorial D parser for Ingres 2006. A proof of concept parser has been produced and has been contributed to the Ingres community repository. A report of the work, Tutorial D and Ingres Parser Report is also available.

Needless to say Ingres engineers are very much involved both in an advisory capacity and with new code contributions: for example, the initial parser version was created at Ingres and provided the seed for the parser at T.U. Ilmenau.

The following example list of features is being created by the original research at the two Universities:

• Efficient complex data integrity constraint enforcement
• Materialized views (continually up-to-date Snapshots)
• Semantic optimization of relational expressions
• Efficient multiple simultaneous assignment
• Temporal database optimization
• Specialization by Constraint
• Unrestricted virtual relvar updates (where possible)
• Self-organizing physical storage structures ("autonomous DBMS")

Work at Warwick University has begun and an interim summary report of progress there is available: Project D Research Progress

More Information

More information is available at the following external web sites

Project D Infrastructure

Information on accessing code and so on is available at Project D Infrastructure

The Third Manifesto Web Site

The Third Manifesto web site is available at: http://www.thethirdmanifesto.com/.

Other Tutorial D Implementations

Other Tutorial D projects are in existence and are listed on The Third Manifesto web site at List of projects.