Native Queries for Persistent Objects

By William Cook, Carl Rosenberger

August 23, 2005 Abstract: Most persistence architectures for Java and .NET provide interfaces to execute queries written in an architecture-specific query language. These interfaces are string based: queries are defined in strings that are passed to the persistence engine for interpretation. String-based query interfaces have significant negative impact on programmer pro- ductivity. The queries are not accessible to development environment features like compile-time type checking, auto-completion, and refac- toring. Programmers must work in two languages: the implementa- tion language and the query language. This paper introduces Native Queries, a concise and type-safe way to express queries directly as Java and C# methods. We describe the design of Native Queries and provide an overview of implementation and optimization issues. The paper also includes a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of the current design of Native Queries.
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