Functional paradigm and databases

Over the last few years, functional programming has gained great popularity compared to imperative programming (note: object-oriented programming is also imperative). Eg. In 2014, Java language also gained some significant functional capabilities (Java 8 version). Functional programming is not new. The first functional language Lisp was created in 1958, a year after the Fortran language and a year before the COBOL language. Functional programming, like logical programming, is (in some way) very similar to programming in SQL - it is highly declarative. In the presentation we will examine functional and logical programming and discuss how some ideas from functional programming could apply to database programming. These ideas are not new, they were advocated in the 80s by Jim Gray (a scientist in the field of databases and transaction processing systems, the Turing Award winner in 1998), but have recently become "modern".