[VPM] Perl Mongers Meeting April 18

Peter Scott Peter at PSDT.com
Tue Apr 11 09:38:48 PDT 2006


Victoria.pm will meet at its regular date, time and place on Tuesday, 
April 18, 7pm, at UVic, in Harry Hickman building, room 120.

Darren Duncan will give a talk on his new Rosetta DBMS project. While 
it will cover some basics for the uninitiated, people who already use 
databases (whether MySQL or Oracle or whatever) will get more out of 
it; but lots of people use databases.

The "Rosetta" DBMS framework, available in twin Perl 6 and Perl 5 
versions, is a powerful but elegant system, which makes it easy to 
create and use relational databases in a very reliable, portable, and 
efficient way.  It is structured with a single rigorously defined 
interface / API and interchangeable back-ends that implement it.  The 
interface is mainly defined in terms of a new high-level programming 
language named "Rosetta D", which is computationally complete and has 
fully integrated database functionality; "Rosetta" has a spartan 
interface like DBI and implements a virtual machine that is embedded in 
your Perl application and in which the Rosetta D code runs (it is 
analagous to the Perl interpreter itself, which provides a virtual 
machine in which Perl code runs).

The Rosetta language and virtual machine are intended to be significant 
improvements over conventional database products and the SQL language, 
both in reliability and expressiveness (but the conventionals are 
emulatable), and database tuning is automatic.  One of its features is 
that you can manipulate a database's schema using the same language you 
use to manipulate its data, by updating the database's system 
catalog.  The project has drawn significant interest from members of 
the Perl and database communities, though it still remains unknown to 
most people.

This presentation / discussion will introduce Rosetta, saying how it 
works and how to use it, and discussing some of my design decisions. 
Darren will also discuss some relational database theory and practice 
in general.

The presentation format is an oral presentation with accompanying 
diagrams drawn on the white board, and there can be group discussion. 
There will not be any handouts, nor any computer slide show, nor likely 
any executing code; those will have to wait for some future month.

While you can not use Rosetta yet, due to its being pre-alpha, you can 
read some of its in-progress design documents at 
http://svn.openfoundry.org/pugs/ext/Rosetta/ (Perl 6) or at 
http://svn.utsl.gen.nz/trunk/Rosetta/ (Perl 5).  Within those 
directories, the most recently updated and significant documents are 
lib/Rosetta.pm (scroll down half-way to the DESCRIPTION pod), and 
lib/Rosetta/Language.pod (the top half is new and good to read, the 
bottom half is old and less valuable).  Regardless, everything spoken 
on and drawn at the meeting itself will be up to date.


If you either want to present something or hear about something, 
contact me (Peter Scott).  Presentations need not be restricted to 
Perl; we can learn by expanding our horizons so Ruby, Python, and 
Haskell, for instance, are all valid.  Topics in functional or O-O 
programming, parsing, or data structures are equally useful.

(Courtesy copy to VLUG members by permission of the list 
manager.  Victoria.pm's home page is <http://victoria.pm.org/>.)
-- 
Peter Scott
Pacific Systems Design Technologies
http://www.perldebugged.com/
http://www.perlmedic.com/



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