Ribbit

• Ribbit
  • Status
    • Current Features
      • Basic @Select .. From ..
      • Cross product
      • Conditionals
      • Limited CREATE TABLE support.
      • INSERT INTO support.
      • DELETE FROM support.
      • UPDATE TABLE support.
  • Roadmap
    • Flesh out Haskell to PostgreSQL type mapping.
  • How it compares with other libraries.
  • The name: Ribbit

Ribbit is yet another type safe relational database library for Haskell, heavily inspired by the amazing Servant library. The goal is to create a type-level language for defining table schemas "as a type", queries that operate on those schemas, and, tangentially, "backends" that can do something useful with those types like talk to an actual database.

Using Ribbit, you might expect to see something like this:

data PeopleTable
instance Table PeopleTable where
  type Name PeopleTable = "people"
  type DBSchema PeopleTable =
    Field "id" Int
    :> Field "name" Text
    :> Field "age" Int
  

type MyQuery = Select '["id", "name"] `From` PeopleTable `Where` "age" `Equals` (?)

matchingPeople <-
  query
    dbConn
    (Proxy :: Proxy MyQuery)
    (Only 21) -- argument that fills in the (?) placeholder

  :: IO [Only Int :> Only Text]

Status

The status of Ribbit "Very Incomplete". My goal is to take a "depth first" approach, where every feature added is production ready before moving on to the next feature. Featured back-ends include postgresql-simple at this time.

Current Features

These are the features that are currently implemented.

Basic @Select .. From ..

We support queries of the form:

type MyQuery = Select '["field1", "field2"] `From` MyTable

Cross product

We support queries of the form:

type MyQuery = Select '["t1.field1", "t2.field2"] `From` '[MyTable1 `As` "t1", MyTable2 `As` "t2"]

Conditionals

We support queries of the form:

type MyQuery = Select '["field1", "field2"] `From` MyTable `Where` <condition>

Where <condition> can include:

• a `And` b: Basic intersection.
• a `Or` b: Basic union.
• "field" `Equals` (?): Test for equality. This introduces a query parameter that must be supplied at runtime.
• "field1" `Equals` "field2": Test the equality of two fields (that both must exist in the schema)
• a `Lt` b: Less than operator.
• a `Lte` b: Less than or equal to operator.
• a `Gt` b: Greater than operator.
• a `Gte` b: Greater than or equal to operator.
• Not a: Not operator.
• "field" `NotEquals` (?): Test for inequality against a query parameter.
• "field1" `NotEquals` "field2": Test for inequality between two fields.

Limited CREATE TABLE support.

The postgresql-simple backend supports creating tables in the database. This support is "limited" because it misses the following features:

• PostgreSQL column types are know for only a small number of Haskell types. This is extensible by the user (by implementing a type class), but it would be nice to have a more comprehensive set of mappings out of the box.

• Foreign key constraints are not yet supported.

• Arbitrary non-primary-key indexes are not yet supported.

What IS supported already is:

• Determining whether a field is nullable, based on whether the corresponding Haskell type is wrapped in a Maybe.

• Compound primary keys. I.e. primary keys consisting of more than one component.

INSERT INTO support.

Basic inserts are supported:

type MyInsert = InsertInto PeopleTable '["id", "name", "age"]

execute
  conn
  (Proxy :: Proxy MyInsert)
  (Only 1 :> Only "Bob Marley" :> Only 36)

DELETE FROM support.

Basic deletes are supported:

type MyDeleteEveryone = DeleteFrom PeopleTable
type MyDeleteById = DeleteFrom PeopleTable `Where` id `Equals` (?)

execute
  conn
  (Proxy :: Proxy MyDeleteEveryone)
  ()

execute
  conn
  (Proxy :: Proxy MyDeleteById)
  (Only 1)

UPDATE TABLE support.

Basic updates are supported:

execute
  conn
  (Proxy :: Proxy (
    Update PeopleTable
      '[
        "name", -- each field adds a query parameter so you can
        "age"   -- provide the new value at run time.
      ]
    `Where` (
      "id" `Equals` (?)
    )
  ))
  (Only newName :> Only newAge :> Only targetEmployeeId)

Roadmap

This is what I plan to work on next:

Evaluate the usefulness of what I've got so far.

I'm am half pleased with the way the query language turned out, because someone with understanding of SQL can at least read and modify queries, even if they would find it hard to construct them from scratch without examples, but I still feel they could be more ergonomic in at least two ways:

1. Better error messages for compiler-guided development.
2. Fewer backticks.

I have tried playing around with defining the query language in terms of value level constructs, which I think can help improve both of these issues, but I haven't yet gotten that to work without requiring so much type annotation that it defeats the purpose of ergonomics. I have some vague idea about how I might solve that with generic instances, but I am reluctant to do anything that smacks of "magic" without exhausting all other possibilities first.

Flesh out Haskell to PostgreSQL type mapping.

As mentioned above, only a small number of Haskell types are mapped to PostgreSQL types out of the box. We would like to make this a more comprehensive mapping out of the box.

How it compares with other libraries.

The short answer is there are a lot of other libraries and I'm not sure. Persistent and esquelleto are ones I've used, but if you search "relational" or "sql" in Hackage there seems to be a lot of other options. Part of the goals for this library are to flesh out this approach myself, so I can have a better context for understanding everything else available. In other words, it is part research project. With that in mind, there are at least a couple of specific goals I have in mind:

• Avoid template Haskell. Persistent is amazing, but the use of Template Haskell makes certain things difficult, like documenting (or for large projects even understanding) everything that is produced by the Template Haskell.

• Make the language easy to understand. If you have some basic SQL knowledge, it should be immediately obvious what is going on even if you are a beginner Haskeller.

• Try to make as much stuff happen at the type level as possible. The ability to write your own type classes or type families over Servant API types is, I feel, part of what makes Servant so amazing. I want to replicate that success here. So, for instance, if someone somewhere defines a schema type that looks like this:

  type MySchema =
    Field "id" Int
    :> Field "name" Text
    :> Field "address" (Maybe Text)
  

  Then you would be free to deconstruct this type (using type families), transform it into another schema, generate customized CREATE TABLE statements if the ones provided aren't good enough for your back-end or use case... that sort of thing. As a somewhat contrived example: maybe, for who knows what reason, you never want to allow null values in your database. You can write a type family that can inspect every field in an arbitrary schema, replacing all the Maybe a with just a, like:

  -- With -XPolyKinds
  type family NoNulls schema where
    NoNulls (Field name (Maybe typ)) = Field name typ
    NoNulls (a :> b) = NoNulls a :> NoNulls b
    NoNulls a = a
  
  NoNulls MySchema 
  -- Same as:
  --   Field "id" Int
  --   :> Field "name" Text
  --   :> Field "address" Text <--- note the lack of Maybe
  

The name: Ribbit

The name means nothing except I kindof like the sound of it. There are so many "sql", "relational", "query", etc. package names already that I didn't want to:

1. get lost in the mix.
2. step on anyone's toes by choosing too similar a name.
3. create confusion by seeming to be associated with some other package with which I am not.