README

For installation instructions, see the INSTALL file.


HaskellDB is a Haskell library for expressing database queries and
operations in a type safe and declarative way. HaskellDB compiles a
relational algebra-like syntax into SQL, submits the operations to the
database for processing, and returns the results as ordinary Haskell
values.

HaskellDB is written entirely in Haskell and works under both the
Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC) and the Hugs Haskell interpreter. The
library is designed to to support multiple database backends.

Currently supported database backends are:
* HSQL (http://htoolkit.sourceforge.net/). HSQL's bindings to ODBC, MySQL,
  PostgreSQL and SQLite are currently supported.
* wxHaskell (http://wxhaskell.sourceforge.net/)

HaskellDB is intended to be platform independent. It should be
possible to use HaskellDB on any platform that has a supported Haskell
implementation and that is supported by the database backend.

HaskellDB was originally written by Daan Leijen and its design is
described in the paper Domain Specific Embedded Compilers, Daan Leijen
and Erik Meijer. 2nd USENIX Conference on Domain-Specific Languages
(DSL), Austin, USA, October 1999. That version of HaskellDB was
published in 1999 and has been available from
http://www.haskell.org/haskellDB/ since then.

The original version implements the entire HaskellDB combinator
library, but has some practical drawbacks. It requires certain
extensions (most notably the typed records extensions) which, in the
form that are used by HaskellDB, are only available in antiquated
versions of the Hugs interpreter. Furthermore, the original HaskellDB
only supports a Windows-specific ADO-based database backend.

The new version of HaskellDB was produced as a student project at
Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. The aim of the
project was to make HaskellDB a practically useful database library.