Native Query Concepts

Database query is a language used to communicate with the database. For a long time databases stood the central and commanding place in software products: the applications were literally written to support the needs of a main central database. However, in the modern high-speed world of distribute computing the transfer and modification of the information plays increasingly important role and the databases more and more often take a place of a temporary storage or a point of exchange.

This evolutionary change results in some practical modifications: more attention is paid to the business logic and tools that are used for its development, language structures are automatically produced and checked by development environments and string-based logic is getting outdated and not enough efficient. Database query language is expected to follow the features of an object-oriented language: type-safe, easy to refactor and test. String-based languages like SQL, OQL, JDOQL do not meet these requirements. To fill this gap and provide developers with sufficient database query tools a new concept was developed by W.Cook and C. Rosenberger which was given a name Native Queries.

In the following paragraphs, we will review the concepts of Native Queries (NQ). We will use Pilot class for all examples suggested further:

01/**//* Copyright (C) 2004 - 2007 db4objects Inc. http://www.db4o.com */
02namespace Db4objects.Db4odoc.NQConcepts
03...{
04    public class Pilot
05    ...{
06        string _name;
07        int _points;
08        
09        public Pilot(string name, int points)
10        ...{
11            _name = name;
12            _points = points;
13        }
14        
15        public int Points
16        ...{
17            get
18            ...{
19                return _points;
20            }
21        }
22        
23        public string Name
24        ...{
25            get
26            ...{
27                return _name;
28            }
29        }
30    }
31}