Fundamental And Secondary Issues In The Design Of Non-Procedural Relational Languages

A number of high-level data manipulation languages have been proposed for the relational model. This paper summarizes results of an analysis of languages and attempts to evaluate various criteria as to their capability of accounting for differences among languages. The distinction between fundamental and secondary characteristics of languages is not the result of a speculative exploration of which features should be made available in a relational language. Instead, this distinction is based on a comparison of existing languages as they are described in the literature.