As I’m a selfmade man, I never really studied relational databases in detail. My intuition told me that the “relational” part was not really suitable for the 3D data, 2D images, animation curves, state machines, and other data I encountered in the videogame and animation business. I could always get away with files, and for the applications I needed to deploy, plugging in a couple of extra gigabytes of RAM and serializing the “object” state to disk was more practical, cheaper and faster.

However, a couple of years ago I started studying computer science (I seem to do the theory after the practice, weird behavior ;-) at the Open University, and one of the exams I did was about databases. Initially this course convinced me that databases are actually very nice, but the course ended with a topic on object oriented databases, which were designed to make storing data like “3D models, graphs, networks, and complex datastructures” more practical. Duh.

Since then, I did deploy a few commercial applications for customers using databases, which worked fine for the typical “simple/flat” database data. I hated embedding a dynamic untyped language like SQL, as much as I hated embedding code in HTML or XML… IMHO it feels UGLY and unsafe. Regarding the other popular data storage format – XML – I did use that a lot, but it seems like going back to the stone ages, when hierarchical stores/databases got invented (and ditched?)

Now, initially after an introduction to Microsoft’s LINQ, and recently having read a very brief overview of HAppS, it seems I’m not the only one with those “feelings”.

Ouch, this introduction got way to long, sorry about that ;-)

Finally some practical questions:

· regarding Haskell and databases, the page http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Libraries_and_tools/Database_interfaces describes a few, but which are the ones that are stable and practical? Any user experiences?

· HApps is not listed in the page above, because it does not use databases? Is HApps reliable or experimental, and does it scale well? Any success stories?

· regarding Haskell and serialization, I don’t think that implementing Read/Show is a good way for real serialization, so what other options exist? I could find some libraries at http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/pkg-list.html#cat:Data, but again which are the most practical and stable? When programming in C++/MFC and C#/.NET, I tended to develop my own serialization frameworks because I used that for many things, like logging commands to disk, performing undo/redo, intra and inter process cut/copy/paste, save/load, etc…

· Regarding serialization, I’m kinda curious how ADTs and even GADTs are stored and retrieved in a relational database? I guess it could be done using BLOBs and serialization to ByteStrings, so bypassing a lot of the database table structures?

· If I would want to experiment with say HAppS, the way I understand it, I first would first have to study “Scratch your boilerplate” and Template Haskell, and maybe some other language features? I’m still new to Haskell, and the road to understanding all language elements and extensions is very long, so sequentially learning it would be insane I guess. I have no practical experience with TH, but I spent a long time trying to do “aspect oriented programming” in C# without success, so TH looks uber to me…

Thanks a lot and best wishes for 2008?

Peter