Abstract
A number of efficient methods for evaluating first-order and monadic-second order queries on finite relational structures are based on tree-decompositions of structures or queries. We systematically study these methods. In the first-part of the paper we consider tree-like structures. We generalize a theorem of Courcelle [7] by showing that on such structures a monadic second-order formula (with free first-order and second-order variables) can be evaluated in time linear in the structure size plus the size of the output. In the second part we study tree-like formulas. We generalize the notions of acyclicity and bounded tree-width from conjunctive queries to arbitrary first-order formulas in a straightforward way and analyze the complexity of evaluating formulas of these fragments. Moreover, we show that the acyclic and bounded tree-width fragments have the same expressive power as the well-known guarded fragment and the finite-variable fragments of first-order logic, respectively.
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Flum, J., Frick, M., Grohe, M. (2001). Query Evaluation via Tree-Decompositions. In: Van den Bussche, J., Vianu, V. (eds) Database Theory — ICDT 2001. ICDT 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1973. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44503-X_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44503-X_2
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