A Language for a Scientific and Engineering Database System

Databases are an important part of many Computer Assisted Design (CAD) applications. Real world knowledge is often defined by a database which is managed by a database system. Unlike most traditional database applications, the CAD process involves significant amounts of scientific and engineering computation on database contents to produce a result. Existing standalone language database systems often cannot meet this computational need. Users can either forego the use of a database system and its conveniences or interface conventional Procedure Oriented Language (POL) programs to database systems for the computational work. This paper describes EXTRAS, a relational algebra query language with extensions for numerical computation. This language has the advantages of a unified approach to computation and database query capabilities and of offering a high level language for numerical computation based on relations.