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: hf8506cbd429a8c21
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 1989
Pagerank: 8.6714301e-05
Overall Rank: 2,302 | 84.53%
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
1,919	The Expressiveness of a Family of Finite Set Languages	1991	PODS	9.3781849e-05
3,981	A Data Transformation System for Biological Data Sources	1995	VLDB	6.8772513e-05
6,368	Towards a Unified Visual Database Access	1993	SIGMOD	5.8092399e-05
6,437	Type Inference for Datalog and its Application to Query Optimisation	2008	PODS	5.7853525e-05
7,232	A Query Language for NC	1994	PODS	5.579276e-05
7,805	Positive Higher-Order Queries	2010	PODS	5.4501544e-05
8,729	New Data Models and Languages - the Challenge	1992	PODS	5.2905577e-05
9,322	Second-Order Signature: A Tool for Specifying Data Models, Query Processing, and Optimization	1993	SIGMOD	5.1942711e-05
10,068	Type inference in the polymorphic relational algebra	1999	PODS	5.0873692e-05
11,486	TypeQL: A Type-Theoretic & Polymorphic Query Language	2024	PODS	4.9793485e-05
13,312	Tutorial: Languages for Collection Types	1994	PODS	4.9793485e-05
13,316	A Polymorphic Calculus for Views and Object Sharing	1994	PODS	4.9793485e-05
13,330	Investigation of Algebraic Query Optimisation for Database Programming Languages	1994	VLDB	4.9793485e-05
13,356	Viewers: A Data-World Analogue of Procedure Calls	1993	VLDB	4.9793485e-05
13,361	A Domain-theoretic Approach to Integrating Functional and Logic Database Languages	1993	VLDB	4.9793485e-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
150	Making Smalltalk a Database System	1984	SIGMOD	0.00028930192
263	Some High-level Language Constructs for Data of Type Relation	1977	SIGMOD	0.00022811354
291	Object and File Management in the EXODUS Extensible Database System	1986	VLDB	0.00021951101
809	FAD, a Powerful and Simple Database Language	1987	VLDB	0.00013777631

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	6,689	Functional Database Query Languages as Typed Lambda Calculi of Fixed Order (Extended Abstract)	1994	PODS
2	4,461	An Object Data Model with Roles	1993	VLDB
3	2,825	Modeling Complex Structures in Object-Oriented Databases	1989	PODS
4	11,486	TypeQL: A Type-Theoretic & Polymorphic Query Language	2024	PODS
5	8,300	Formal Semantics and Analysis of Object Queries	2003	SIGMOD
6	13,342	A Logical Semantics for Object-Oriented Databases	1993	SIGMOD
7	5,074	A Relationship Mechanism for a Strongly Typed Object-Oriented Database Programming Language	1991	VLDB
8	10,068	Type inference in the polymorphic relational algebra	1999	PODS
9	7,337	Typed Query Languages for Databases Containing Queries	1998	PODS
10	13,316	A Polymorphic Calculus for Views and Object Sharing	1994	PODS