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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 2249–2253Cite as

Query Containment

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Definition

One query is contained in another if, independent of the values of the “stored data” (that is, database), the set of answers to the first query on the database is a subset of the set of answers to the second query on the same database. A formal definition of containment is as follows: denote with Q(D) the result of computing query Q over database D. A query Q 1 is said to be contained in a query Q 2, denoted by Q 1 ⊑ Q 2, if for all databases D, the set of tuples Q 1(D) is a subset of the set of tuples Q 2(D) – that is, Q 1(D) ⊆ Q 2(D). This definition of containment, as well as the related definition of query equivalence, can be used to specify query containment and equivalence on databases conforming to both relational and nonrelational data models, including XML and object-oriented databases.

Historical Background

Testing for query containment on finite databases is, in general, co-recursively enumerable: The procedure is going through all possible databases and...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA

    Rada Chirkova

Authors
  1. Rada Chirkova
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 266 Ferst Drive, 30332-0765, Atlanta, GA, USA

    LING LIU (Professor) (Professor)

  2. Database Research Group David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, N2L 3G1, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. TAMER ÖZSU (Professor and Director, University Research Chair) (Professor and Director, University Research Chair)

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© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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Chirkova, R. (2009). Query Containment. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_1269

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