OSCON 2006 Session Proposal
by Darren Duncan
submitted for consideration on 2006 February 13
notification of its non-approval received on 2006 April 12

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Title of your Proposal:

    Better databases in Perl with Rosetta

Track:

    Perl

Proposal Type:

    45 Minute Conference Session

Audience Level:

    General

Audience Type:

    This talk is for intermediate Perl programmers that already have some
    experience using DBI and/or its wrapper modules.

Brief Description:

    This talk introduces the new "Rosetta" DBMS framework, which makes it
    easy to create and use relational databases in a very reliable,
    powerful, portable, and efficient way.  Making reliable solutions need
    not be error prone and slow.  Native Perl 5 and 6 implementations.
    Includes examples of use.

Abstract or Full Description:

    The daily work of many Perl developers involves databases, which their
    applications depend on to manage information, or to store their objects
    persistently.  But they often aren't being used anywhere near as
    effectively as they could be, meaning that just getting things done
    involves too much developer effort and time, and leads to reliability
    problems from various complexities or ambiguities they face.  This is
    even more the case when the databases are large, involving complex
    business rules, and developers want the freedom to switch from one
    database vendor to another.

    This talk introduces the new "Rosetta" DBMS framework, an unprecedented
    solution, which makes it easy to create and use relational databases in
    a very reliable, powerful, portable, and efficient way.  Native Perl 5
    and 6 implementations.  This talk outlines how it works, how you would
    use it, and how to migrate to it from other database solutions, like
    DBI.

    Rosetta is a complete and uncompromising implementation of "The Third
    Manifesto", Christopher J. Date's and Hugh Darwen's proposal for a
    foundation for data and database management systems.  You are saved a
    lot of work because you can just focus on saying *what* your database
    is like, and Rosetta figures out for itself how to implement that in an
    optimal fashion; you don't have to design or code in an unpleasantly
    verbose way just to optimize the database engine.

    Its truly relational database structure allows you to model anything in
    the real world accurately, and it ensures that your data is always in a
    consistent and correct state, so you can trust what it says.  You can
    easily define arbitrarily complex custom data types, and operators, and
    constraints that enforce any kind of business rules.  Queries and
    updates are formed using logically sound expressions that give you a
    lot of flexibility without verbosity.  Using the database catalog, can
    also perform all data definition using the same operators you use for
    querying and data manipulation.

Biography:

    Darren Duncan is a developer of applications and databases, has written
    several CPAN modules, and participates in Pugs / Perl 6 development.
    Darren's life's work is to build consumer-useable ontological database
    solutions for accurately organizing and easily sharing the world's
    knowledge over the long term, including scientific, historical, and
    genealogical.

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