A Java-Integrated Object Oriented Query Language

Recently the general-purpose programming languages community has encountered the need for more powerful and more abstract expressions, comparable to query languages. Current proposals, however, still suffer from some aspects of impedance mismatch between programming and query languages. This paper describes a prototype of a Java extension with the user-friendly object-oriented query language SBQL. The resulting functionality is partially inspired by the LINQ language available in the Microsoft .NET framework. The presented solution, although being a prototype, offers a promising performance of query evaluation. We argue that compared to LINQ, several advantages of this can be observed, e.g. with respect to universality, and a less verbose, syntax, familiar to the query language community. Moreover, it offers several unique features including query translation into a native Java code, universal sorting and transitive closure operators, and the support for generic collections. The resulting language is applicable to various data processing problems and provides a starting point for several interesting research areas. The paper presents the language design, Java integration issues, performance considerations and comparison with LINQ.