VMware Tech Talk June Series - Comprehending SQL

We would like to invite you to our VMware Tech Talk on the 2nd of June: Comprehending SQL 

Ever since its inception in the early 1970s, SQL has been the de-facto standard for querying data stored in collection-oriented (a.k.a. relational) databases. In this talk, we recapitulate the history of SQL and highlight some pitfalls with the traditional set-theoretic foundation of SQL semantics. To tackle these pitfalls, we introduce an alternative semantic foundation based on recursive data types and structural recursion. Starting from those, we then illustrate how the categorical notion of a monad and monad comprehensions can be seen as an abstract manifestation of the familiar SELECT-FROM-WHERE syntax adopted by SQL. 

Furthermore, we show how the abstract comprehensions syntax corresponding to a SQL query can be manipulated algebraically in a way which solves the problems with the set-theoretic semantics.

More here.