An introduction to Remy's fast polymorphic record projection
Limsoon Wong · ACM SIGMOD Record · 1995
Traditionally, a record projection is compiled when all fields of the record are known in advance. The need to know all fields in advance leads to very clumsy programs, especially for querying external data sources. In a paper that had not been widely circulated in the database community, Remy presented in programming language context a constant-time implementation of the record projection operation that does not have such a requirement. This paper introduces his technique and suggests an improvement to his technique in the context of database queries.