A Language for Manipulating Arrays

This paper describes the Array Manipulation Language (AML), an algebra for multidimensional array data. AML is generic, in the sense that it can be customized to support a wide variety of domain-specific operations on arrays. AML expressions can be treated declaratively and subjected to rewrite optimizations. To illustrate this, several rewrite rules that exploit the structural properties of the AML operations are presented. Some techniques for efficient evaluation of AML expressions are also discussed. 1 Introduction It has become widely recognized that database systems should support non-traditional data types, such as sequences, images, and video. Object-relational database systems currently support such data through user-defined data types and their associated methods. These methods can be applied to selected data, or can be used in selection or join conditions. For example, suppose that 16-bit gray-scale images have been defined as a database type and that two methods are define..