For installation instructions, see the INSTALL file.
HaskellDB is a Haskell library for expressing database queries and operations in a type safe and declarative way. HaskellDB compiles a relational algebra-like syntax into SQL, submits the operations to the database for processing, and returns the results as ordinary Haskell values.
HaskellDB is written entirely in Haskell and works under both the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC) and the Hugs Haskell interpreter. The library is designed to to support multiple database backends.
Currently supported database backends are:
HaskellDB is intended to be platform independent. It should be possible to use HaskellDB on any platform that has a supported Haskell implementation and that is supported by the database backend.
HaskellDB was originally written by Daan Leijen and its design is described in the paper Domain Specific Embedded Compilers, Daan Leijen and Erik Meijer. 2nd USENIX Conference on Domain-Specific Languages (DSL), Austin, USA, October 1999. That version of HaskellDB was published in 1999 and has been available from http://www.haskell.org/haskellDB/ since then.
The original version implements the entire HaskellDB combinator library, but has some practical drawbacks. It requires certain extensions (most notably the typed records extensions) which, in the form that are used by HaskellDB, are only available in antiquated versions of the Hugs interpreter. Furthermore, the original HaskellDB only supports a Windows-specific ADO-based database backend.
The new version of HaskellDB was produced as a student project at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. The aim of the project was to make HaskellDB a practically useful database library.