Name: Categorical Databases
Start: 2019-10-09T18:00:00-04:00
End: 2019-10-09T20:00:00-04:00
Location: ATA LLC

This month Ryan Wisnesky will be presenting on Categorical
Databases.

We also invite everyone to give a lightning talk (5-15 minutes)
on any topic you like, as long as it's of interest to the
Clojure community.

Pizza will be provided. Please RSVP so we have an idea of how
much to order.

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The open-source Categorical Query Language (CQL) and integrated
development environment (IDE) performs data-related tasks —
such as querying, combining, migrating, and evolving databases
— using category theory, a branch of mathematics that has
revolutionized several areas of computer science. Open-source
CQL is production-ready for single-node in-memory data
processing workloads, such as integrating data for data
science. It is available for free download at
categoricaldata.net.

Its value proposition is:
- Reduce risk of failure through artificial intelligence. CQL
contains an embedded automated theorem prover that
guarantees the correctness of CQL programs. For example, a
CQL program cannot materialize an instance that violates a
data integrity constraint. Such errors are detected at
compile time, when they are easiest to fix.
- Preserve data quality. High-quality data is expensive to
obtain, so it is important to preserve that quality
throughout the data life-cycle. CQL programs evolve and
migrate data in a mathematically universal way, with zero
degradation. As such, data integrated by CQL has many
advantages, including perfect provenance: every row in the
output of an CQL program contains a lineage that describes
exactly how that row was obtained from input data.
- Increased developer productivity through higher-level
abstractions. CQL generalizes concepts from SQL using
powerful principles from category theory. For example, CQL
generalizes SQL's select-from-where queries from returning
single tables to returning many tables related by foreign
keys. Such higher-level abstractions enable developers to be
more productive.

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About the speaker:

Ryan Wisnesky obtained B.S. and M.S. degrees in mathematics and
computer science from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in
computer science from Harvard University, where he studied the
design and implementation of provably correct software systems.
Previously, he was a postdoctoral associate in the MIT
department of mathematics, where he developed the categorical
query language, CQL. He currently leads open-source and
commercial development of CQL as CTO of Conexus AI. He
maintains an active collaboration with the
information-integration department of IBM Research, where he
contributed to the Clio, Orchid, and HIL projects.

Mike Gallaher

Emma Taylor

National Capital Area Clojure Users Group

Technology

Clojure

Computer Programming

Software Development

User Group

Functional Programming

Category Theory

John

Suraj

Jay Singh

Pranaychandra Ravi

Thomas Karras

Matthew Courtney

liebke