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In this paper we study database query languages and their use for programming nontraditional applications, such as engineering and artificial intelligence applications. In such environments, database programs are used to code applications that work over large data sets it- siding in databases. Optimizing such programs then becomes a necessity. We look at various optimization techniques and suggest transformations to be used for Improving the performance of database programs. These transformations result in new equivalent database programs with better space and lime performance. Several of these techniques apply to classical query languages, although the primary focus of this paper is on extended query languages which include an iteration operator. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Commercially available database systems do not meet the information and processing needs of design and manufacturing environments. A new generation of systems-engineering Information systems-must be built to meet these needs. In this paper, we address the architectural and computational aspects of such systems and propose solutions. We argue that a mainframe-workstation architecture is needed to provide distributed functionality while ensuring high availability and low communication overhead, that explicit control of meta-knowledge is needed to support extendibility and evolution, that large rule bases are needed to make the knowledge of the systems active, and that incremental computation models are needed to achieve the required performance of such engineering information systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pictorial databases require efficient and direct spatial search based on the analog form of spatial objects and relationships instead of search based on some cumbersome alphanumeric encodings of the pictures. This paper briefly describes PSQL, a query language which allows pictorial domains to be presented to the user in their analog form and allows him to do direct manipulation on the objects found on those domains. Direct spatial search and computation on the pictures is done using efficient data structures, R- and R+-trees (multi-dimensional B-trees), which are excellent devices for searching spatial objects and relationships found on pictures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]