Database Programming in Machiavelli - a Polymorphic Language with Static Type Inference

Summary: ML-like polymorphic language with extended type inference enables cross-record field access for generic relational programming. Objects as reference types with identity views support static typing for OO databases, enabling sets, joins, and projections. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 2489
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 1989
Pagerank: 8.8703718e-05
Overall Rank: 2,248 | 84.58%
DOI: 10.1145/67544.66931

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Atsushi Ohori (University of Pennsylvania)
2. Peter Buneman (University of Pennsylvania)
3. Val Breazu-Tannen (University of Pennsylvania)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{ohori_sigmod89,
        title = {{Database Programming in Machiavelli - a Polymorphic Language with Static Type Inference}},
        author = {Ohori, Atsushi and Buneman, Peter and Breazu-Tannen, Val},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '89},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/67544.66931},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/67544.66931},
        year = {1989}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 15 of 15 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,864	The Expressiveness of a Family of Finite Set Languages	1991	PODS	9.5928463e-05
3,915	A Data Transformation System for Biological Data Sources	1995	VLDB	7.0193727e-05
6,239	Towards a Unified Visual Database Access	1993	SIGMOD	5.9425753e-05
6,310	Type Inference for Datalog and its Application to Query Optimisation	2008	PODS	5.9176726e-05
7,086	A Query Language for NC	1994	PODS	5.7073076e-05
7,654	Positive Higher-Order Queries	2010	PODS	5.5746273e-05
8,562	New Data Models and Languages - the Challenge	1992	PODS	5.4119882e-05
9,152	Second-Order Signature: A Tool for Specifying Data Models, Query Processing, and Optimization	1993	SIGMOD	5.3133028e-05
9,878	Type inference in the polymorphic relational algebra	1999	PODS	5.2041072e-05
11,138	TypeQL: A Type-Theoretic & Polymorphic Query Language	2024	PODS	5.093636e-05
13,022	Tutorial: Languages for Collection Types	1994	PODS	5.093636e-05
13,026	A Polymorphic Calculus for Views and Object Sharing	1994	PODS	5.093636e-05
13,040	Investigation of Algebraic Query Optimisation for Database Programming Languages	1994	VLDB	5.093636e-05
13,066	Viewers: A Data-World Analogue of Procedure Calls	1993	VLDB	5.093636e-05
13,071	A Domain-theoretic Approach to Integrating Functional and Logic Database Languages	1993	VLDB	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 4 of 4 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
147	Making Smalltalk a Database System	1984	SIGMOD	0.00029474235
247	Some High-level Language Constructs for Data of Type Relation	1977	SIGMOD	0.00023302214
283	Object and File Management in the EXODUS Extensible Database System	1986	VLDB	0.00022377907
782	FAD, a Powerful and Simple Database Language	1987	VLDB	0.00014080876

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#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	4,385	An Object Data Model with Roles	1993	VLDB
2	6,563	Functional Database Query Languages as Typed Lambda Calculi of Fixed Order (Extended Abstract)	1994	PODS
3	2,768	Modeling Complex Structures in Object-Oriented Databases	1989	PODS
4	11,138	TypeQL: A Type-Theoretic & Polymorphic Query Language	2024	PODS
5	8,120	Formal Semantics and Analysis of Object Queries	2003	SIGMOD
6	13,052	A Logical Semantics for Object-Oriented Databases	1993	SIGMOD
7	4,951	A Relationship Mechanism for a Strongly Typed Object-Oriented Database Programming Language	1991	VLDB
8	9,878	Type inference in the polymorphic relational algebra	1999	PODS
9	7,196	Typed Query Languages for Databases Containing Queries	1998	PODS
10	13,026	A Polymorphic Calculus for Views and Object Sharing	1994	PODS