Ferry: Database-Supported Program Execution

Torsten GrustManuel MayrJan RittingerTom Schreiber

Proceedings of the 28th ACM SIGMOD Int’l Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD 2009), Providence, Rhode Island (USA), June 2009.

We demonstrate the language Ferry and its editing, compilation, and execution environment FerryDeck. Ferry’s type system and operations match those of scripting or programming languages; its compiler has been designed to emit (bundles of) compliant and efficient SQL:1999 statements. Ferry acts as a glue that permits a programming style in which developers access database tables using their programing language’s own syntax and idioms - the Ferry-expressible fragments of such programs may be executed by a relational database back-end, i.e. close to the data. The demonstrator FerryDeck implements compile-and-execute-as-you-type interactivity for FerryDeck and offers a variety of (graphical) hooks to explore and inspect this approach to database-supported program execution.