GSoC Draft Proposal : Building a Specialized Syntax based Querying module over Views Module

Personal Details

Name: Dhruv Baldawa
Email: dhruvbaldawa@gmail.com
Personal Website: http://dhruvb.wordpress.com
Skype ID or GTalk: dhruvbaldawa@gmail.com
IRC nick: dhruvbaldawa
Phone number: +(91)-9323321233
School Name: Thakur College of Engineering and Technology, University of Mumbai
Years completed: Third Year Computer Engineering
PHP Experience Level: Advanced

Open Source Development Experience

PHP Experience:

1. Developed website for All India Stainless Steel Industries Association (http://www.aissia.org)
2. Developed Mass Mailing application
3. Developed Facebook Application (http://apps.facebook.com/invertendo)
4. Developed website for College Technical Festival
5. Developed eBooks Repository Management application
6. Mobile UI for Home Automation System
7. Developing a PHP Script Obfuscator
8. Building a open-source Paper Conference Management System : http://sourceforge.net/projects/conms/

Academic Performance:

I am amongst the first 4 students in my department. My aggregate from previous 2 semesters is 76.82 %

The courses completed in college are :

• C++ Programming Language
• Java Programming Language
• Analysis of Algorithms and Design
• Data Structures and Files
• Computer Organization and Architecture
• Computer Graphics
• Operating Systems
• Computer Networks
• Theory of Computer Science
• Database Management Systems
• Advanced Database Management Systems
• Microprocessors
• Web Engineering
• Advanced Computer Networks
• Advanced Microprocessors
• Systems Programming and Compiler Construction
• Data Warehousing and Mining
• Object Oriented Software Engineering

Why do you I want to do this project with Drupal ?

Drupal has an excellent Views module, which also provides a good API, which can act as a good base for this project. The Views Module is a good abstraction between the user and the data sources.

Specialized Syntax for Quick SQL Query Building

This post is not maintained.

Please check my blog post at : http://dhruvb.com/blog/node/2 for more updated details

Originally, I used to call it “Natural Language to SQL Translator”, but I guess what I intend to do at this point of time is not Natural Language, it is rather a specialized syntax, which I guess can be further extended to natural language. Let me make a thing clear, about the system :

• It is something which the user sees, and types a query in, it has nothing to do with the data-related operations in a database.
• The only time it deals with data, is when the result-set is generated and given back to the system, so that it can be post-processed into a better manner.

I have been developing a Paper Conference Management System for an International Paper Conference which is conducted in our college, and there are various queries and reports which are to be generated, but considering the modularity of the software architecture and the normalized databases, the SQL queries tend to become bigger and bigger and making it difficult for the user who doesn’t know the database schema to generate reports.

For example, a SQL query to get the details of authors who have paper in track “Database Engineering” :

SELECT authors.id, users.name
FROM user,authors,papers,author_paper,tracks
WHERE users.id = authors.id AND
authors.id = author_paper.author_id AND
papers.id = author_paper.paper_id AND
papers.track_id = tracks.id AND
tracks.name = “Database Engineering”;

but with the system in-place, it would look something like :

get author details having track(name = “Database Engineering”);