Baseline Operation-Based Evolution and Versioning of Data

Jonathan Edwards, Tomas Petricek

Unpublished Draft.

Baseline is a platform for richly structured data supporting change in multiple dimensions: mutation over time, collaboration across space, and evolution through design changes. It is built upon Operational Differencing, a new technique for managing data in terms of high-level operations that include refactorings and schema changes. We use operational differencing to construct an operation-based form of version control on data structures used in programming languages and relational databases.

This approach to data version control offers high-fidelity diffing and merging despite intervening structural transformations like schema changes. It offers users a simplified conceptual model of version control for ad hoc usage: There is no repo; Branching is just copying. The information maintained in a repo can be synthesized more precisely from the append-only histories of branches. Branches can be flexibly shared as is commonly done with document files, except with the added benefit of diffing and merging.

We conjecture that queries can be operationalized into a sequence of schema and data operations. We develop that idea on a query language fragment containing selects and joins. Operationalized queries are represented as a future timeline that is speculatively executed as a branch off of the present state, returning a value from its hypothetical future. Operationalized queries get rewritten to accommodate schema change "for free" by the machinery of operational differencing.

We discuss the design of Baseline's direct manipulation UI supporting interactive schema changes as well as diffing and merging between databases. We evaluate Baseline with case studies of schema evolution problems identified iin a literature review, including the set of challenge problems we identified in a prior paper.

Draft and more information

• Download paper draft (PDF)
• Check out the interactive Baseline demo!
• Send your feedback and corrections via GitHub

Comments are welcome!

If you have any comments, suggestions or related ideas, I'll be happy to hear from you! Send me an email at tomas@tomasp.net or get in touch via BlueSky at @tomasp.net.