OGRE - Open Generic Representation.
OGRE is a self-describing data storage. It is open for extensibility, i.e., adding new types of knowledge doesn't break the storage. It also has a well-specified open representation, so that any tool written in any language (or even a human itself) can create, modify and understand the contents (like XML). Ogre provides data persitance and, more importantly, a type safe way of querying and updating the data. The query language is rich enough, and supports joins and boolean constraints
It can be seen as a document NoSQL database engine. As a backing storage Ogre uses S-Expressions, and the structure of a document is close to JSON. In fact it is a restricted subset of JSON, where only scalar values are allowed.
A database, called a "document" (or just "doc") in Ogre parlance, is a set of facts. Each fact is described with a proposition having the following syntax,
(<attribute-name> <v1> <v2> ... <vM> )
where <attribute-name>
is a name of a proposition and <vN>
is the value of N
'th object (or subject) of a proposition. For example,
(student (name Joe) (gpa 3.5))
is a proposition that a student named Joe
has a GPA rate 3.5
. Thus a proposition is a tuple with named fields. All propositions must be well-typed, so the predicate student
should be declared before used. The field values maybe stored (and are by default) without the names in the order in which they are specified in the declaration, e.g., the following definition is equivalent to the previous one:
(student Joe 3.5)
Given, that the predicate is declared as:
(declare student (name str) (gpa float))
where the declaration has the following syntax:
declaration ::= ( declare <attribute-name> <field> <field> ... )
field ::= ( <field-name> <field-type> )
field-type ::= int | str | bool | float
Each declaration declare an attribute, that defines a type of the propositions. Unlike the SQL, we denote each tuple type with the word attribute, as under our model each document describes some knowledge (an attribute) about some abstract entity. For example, a document "college.ogre" that contains definitions of attributes named student
, teacher
, class
, assignments
is a set of knowledge about a college. Thus an attribute maps to a SQL notion of table (or a relvar). Correspondingly, a column of a table (that is usually referred as an attribute in the relational model), maps to Ogre's field.
type ('a, 'k) typeinfo constraint 'k = _ -> _
type information associated with an attribute
type ('a, 'k) attribute = unit -> ('a, 'k) typeinfo
a descriptor of an attribute.
Used to construct attribute values, and to query documents. Created with declare
function.
Note, that due to a value restriction, an attribute should be defined as a function returning a type information.
t field
a descriptor of an attribute field.
Used to construct attributes, and to construct variables that reference particular fields of an attribute.
the type variable t
range is float
, int64
, string
or bool
.
attrs query
constructs a query type.
Created using the Query
module. The attrs
type variable encodes the types of requested attributes. For example,
((student -> teacher -> 'a) -> 'a) query
represents a query for two attributes of type student
and teacher
correspondingly. It is represented as a continuation, denoting the fact, that the query can be executed later for an arbitrary result.
type ('f, 'k) scheme constraint 'f = _ -> _ constraint 'k = _ -> _
type that describes an attribute.
The two type variables describe the constructor and destructor interface. The 'a
variable, the accessor, describes how an attribute can be constructed. The 's
variable, describes how an attribute can be packed in the database. These two types come along and differ only in a return type. The general form of a type variable is ('a -> 'r) -> 'r
, where 'r
is the return type (a type of attribute for instance), and 'a
variable is extended every time a new field is added to a scheme.
val declare : name:string -> ('f -> 'a, 'k) scheme -> 'f -> ('a, 'k) typeinfo
let attr () = declare ~name scheme
declares an attribute named with name
, and having a type described by the scheme
.
Due to a value restriction, each attribute should be defined as a thunk (a function).
module Type : sig ... end
module Query : sig ... end
Domain specific language for constructing queries.
module type S = sig ... end
Monadic interface to the document.
Make(M)
returns an Ogre monad implementation wrapped in a monad M
.
Default implementation of the Orge monad, that is not wrapped into any other monads (in other words, that is wrapped into the identity)
include S
with type 'a m = 'a
and type 'a t = 'a Make(Monads.Std.Monad.Ident).t
and type 'a e = doc -> ('a * doc) Core_kernel.Or_error.t
include Monads.Std.Monad.S with type 'a t = 'a Make(Monads.Std.Monad.Ident).t
val void : 'a t -> unit t
void m
computes m
and discrards the result.
val sequence : unit t list -> unit t
sequence xs
computes a sequence of computations xs
in the left to right order.
val forever : 'a t -> 'b t
forever xs
creates a computationt that never returns.
Various function combinators lifted into the Kleisli category.
module Pair : sig ... end
The pair interface lifted into the monad.
The triple interface lifted into a monad.
module Lift : sig ... end
Lifts functions into the monad.
Interacting between monads and language exceptions
Lifts collection interface into the monad.
The Monad.Collection.S interface for lists
The Monad.Collection.S interface for sequences
include Monads.Std.Monad.Syntax.S with type 'a t := 'a t
val (>=>) : ('a -> 'b t) -> ('b -> 'c t) -> 'a -> 'c t
f >=> g
is fun x -> f x >>= g
val (!$) : ('a -> 'b) -> 'a t -> 'b t
val (!$$) : ('a -> 'b -> 'c) -> 'a t -> 'b t -> 'c t
val (!$$$) : ('a -> 'b -> 'c -> 'd) -> 'a t -> 'b t -> 'c t -> 'd t
val (!$$$$) :
('a -> 'b -> 'c -> 'd -> 'e) ->
'a t ->
'b t ->
'c t ->
'd t ->
'e t
!$$$$f
is Lift.quaternary f
val (!$$$$$) :
('a -> 'b -> 'c -> 'd -> 'e -> 'f) ->
'a t ->
'b t ->
'c t ->
'd t ->
'e t ->
'f t
!$$$$$f
is Lift.quinary f
include Core_kernel.Monad.S with type 'a t := 'a t
val (>>=) : 'a t -> ('a -> 'b t) -> 'b t
val (>>|) : 'a t -> ('a -> 'b) -> 'b t
val bind : 'a t -> f:('a -> 'b t) -> 'b t
val map : 'a t -> f:('a -> 'b) -> 'b t
val join : 'a t t -> 'a t
val ignore_m : 'a t -> unit t
val all : 'a t list -> 'a list t
val all_unit : unit t list -> unit t
val all_ignore : unit t list -> unit t
Monadic operators, see Monad.Syntax.S for more.
val require : ?that:('a -> bool) -> ('a, _) attribute -> 'a t
require a ~that:p
requires that an attribute a
has one and only one value that satisfies a predicate p
. It is an error, if there are no such values, or if there are more than one value.
val request : ?that:('a -> bool) -> ('a, _) attribute -> 'a option t
request a ~that:p
request no more than one value of an attribute a
, that satisfies a predicate p
. The returned value is wrapped in an option. If there are more than one satisfying value, then it is an error.
val foreach : ('a -> 'b) query -> f:'a -> 'b seq t
foreach query ~f:action
applies an action
for each value of an attributes specified in the query. The query
value is built using a domain specific language embedded into OCaml. This language is very similar to SQL, and has join and where clauses, e.g.,
let better_than_average_students =
foreach Query.(begin
select
~where:(students.(gpa) > float 3.5)
~join:[
[field classid];
[
field teacher ~from:students;
field id ~from:teachers
]]
(from students $ teachers)
end)
~f:(fun s t -> return (s,t))
The type of the query
value encodes the type of the function f
. A well formed query has a type of form (t1 -> t2 -> .. -> tm -> 'a t) -> 'a t
, where t1
till tm
are types of attributes enumerated in the from clause
(in that particular order).
See the Query
module documentation for more information about the query EDSL.
val collect : (('a -> 'a) -> 'b) query -> 'b seq t
collect query
is the same as foreach query ~f:ident
provide attr v1 v2 ... vm
stores the constituents of an attribute value in the document. An attribute type encodes not only the type of an attribute value, but also a type and the order of the fields. Thus, the attribute
itself captures a format of the attribute representation, the same as format
is used in printf-like functions. In that sense, the provide
function is variadic, where the first argument (the attribute) defines the type and the arity of the function.
fail error
aborts an inference process with the specified error
.
failf fmt args... ()
constructs an error based on the specified format fmt
and arguments, terminated by the unit value ()
. Example:
failf "the file type %s is unsupported" name ()
Note: don't forget to terminate a sequence of arguments with an extra unit value. See the corresponding invalid_argf
and failwithf
function for the reason, why this extra argument is needed.
eval property document
makes an inference of a property
based on facts stored in a document
. If all requirements are satisfied and no errors occurred the inferred result.
For example, given the property names_of_best_students
, defined as,
let names_of_best_students =
foreach Query.(select (from students)
~where:(students.(gpa) > float 3.8))
~f:(fun s -> return (Student.name s))
we can evaluate this property, with
eval names_of_best_students
to get a sequence (possibly empty) of all students that have the GPA score greater than 3.8.
exec op doc
executes an operation op
that, presumably, updates the document doc
, returns an updated version.
run op doc
runs an operation op
that does some inference as well as may update the document. This function is a usual part of a generic state monad interface, and is provided for the consistency. Usually, it is a bad idea, or a notion of a bad style to use this function.