Sketch-Oriented Databases
This work provides a foundational categorical framework for database paradigms, aiming to unify various database models and features for database researchers and developers.
This paper introduces sketch-oriented databases, a categorical framework that models database paradigms as finite-limit sketches and individual databases as set-valued models. It demonstrates how this formalism uniformly captures common graph features and proposes inference rules for lazy path computation using localizers, which are also useful for database type conformance.
This paper introduces sketch-oriented databases, a categorical framework that encodes database paradigms as finite-limit sketches and individual databases and schemas as set-valued models. It illustrates the formalism through graph-oriented paradigms such as quivers, RDF triplestores and property graphs. It also shows how common graph features such as labels, attributes, typing, and paths, are uniformly captured by sketch constructions. Because paths play an important role in queries, we propose inference rules formalized via localizers to compute useful paths lazily; such localizers are also useful for tasks like database type conformance. Finally, the paper introduces stuttering sketches, whose aim is to facilitate modular composition and scalable model growth: stuttering sketches are finite-limit sketches in which relations are specified by a single limit instead of two nested limits, and the paper proves that finite unions of models of a stuttering sketch are pointwise colimits.