Expressiveness improvements of OutSystems DSL query primitives

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática

In the ever more competitive market, companies are forced to reduce their operational costs and innovate. In order to do that, some companies successfully adopted new approaches, some of them using domain specific languages (DSL), building their entire system and all the respective layers in less time and more focused in their business. Frequently, the application business layer interacts with the data layer through SQL queries, in order to obtain or modify data. There are some products in the market that try to make life easier for developers, allowing them to get the data using the features of visual query builders, also available in standard SQL. However, it is not expectable that every possible query can be written through these visual query builders, which leads us to the following questions "What should and what can easily be supported by visual query builders?". These questions are relevant in order to help improving the experience of developers and save them time. This work aims to study and analyse techniques that help detecting patterns in structured data and, afterwards, propose a suitable way to view and manage the visualization of the occurrence of such detected patterns. In order to help identify the most frequent patterns and thus contribute to solve the above questions, with this conjunction of topics we expect to provide a way to improve the experience of understanding a large amount of data in a particular context. Once understood some patterns that could be present in the data and their importance, we are ready to propose a new model in the context of OutSystems Agile PlatformTM, in terms of their visual query builder, aiming to increase its value, improve its expressiveness and offer a powerful visual way to build queries.