Graph manipulation to queries
Typically with an information system there are two ways of writing systems - one is predominantly through mutating queries and the other is through manipulation of objects in memory such as references between objects. ORMs blur the lines a bit. What if we could silently transform one form to another
This idea is to take code that manipulates objects in memory through dereferences and loops to be automatically rewritten to query based logic.
For loops and while loops can be replaced with queries with conditions on automatically.
Infinity family or homebase is about an ontology that defines objects and their relationships. We also want the operations to be clearly definable and efficient.
+[project]
Do you mean something along the lines, that objects are just products of mutating queries, so we want a well-defined state space?
// ORMs blur the lines a bit. What if we could silently transform one form to another
To decompose an object into queries, you'd have to have a history of mutations, a bit like git history of repository state changes.
It is obviously possible to decompose each object into queries that formed it by providing a history for each of them. Are you proposing to have histories for each object types, am I understanding it correctly? Or, are you suggesting us moving the data to a versioned data storage, that is a bit like git? How would this work in practice?
Essentially I want to transform code AST into an efficient query that a database can execute.
Say I was looking for books with a rating of 10/10
books = load_from_server_json('books')
good_books = []
for book in books {
If book["rating"] == 10 (
good_books.append(book)
}
}
This would be transformed into the following query
Select * from books where rating = 10
It gets more complicated when there is a graph of objects where there is manipulations to multiple fields. Like you say, you would have to have the code trace the mutations to work out how to generate an efficient query that incorporated joins.
Would this invention be a kind of "ORM", that supports making data mutation graph out of the box?
It would be a form of ORM. ORMs track dirtiness of individual records not bulk records.
The goal is to find more efficient representations of manual code and convert it to efficient queries.
The problem with for loops (and ORMs) is that you require the data be in memory. The database is better at paging in records into memory than naively written code that loads it all at once.
Oh, you mean translator AST to efficient SQL translator?
When you think about AST, and that it could be doing many loops over objects, creating and checking properties, and how to rewrite that into an efficient SQL query, it can sometimes be a challenge, and you'd like a system that would automatically translate your procedural query into efficient SQL declarative query.
When it comes to Infinity family / Homebase, we could do this by manually optimizing the database, and working on the DB model together, in other words, optimizing the normalization of DB model (that serves as ontology).
However, if you want to achieve this kind of thing automatically, I think, it's a challenge for AI domain, in language translation (AST to SQL), though, it would perhaps be a simpler version of translation, because the algorithms to compute the data features required to do an SQL query would be already embedded in the AST, one would just need to find good sub-queries for SQL ("structured query language" -- I think the SQL name itself implies, that we can do structured sub-queries to arrive at the final result of query).