Persistent functional languages: toward functional relational databases

Functional languages provide new approaches to concurrency control, based on techniques such as lazy evaluation and memoization. We have designed and implemented a persistent functional language based on these ideas, which we plan to use for the implementation of a relational database system. With such a database system, we aim to show that lazy evaluation can be used to perform online schema transformations. Additionally, our persistent language allows database programs to be written as stored transactions, a mechanism similar to stored procedures. At a later stage, we want to leverage existing verification tools for the automatic verification of postconditions over these functional transactions