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Computing complete answers to queries in the presence of limited access patterns

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Abstract.

In data applications such as information integration, there can be limited access patterns to relations, i.e., binding patterns require values to be specified for certain attributes in order to retrieve data from a relation. As a consequence, we cannot retrieve all tuples from these relations. In this article we study the problem of computing the complete answer to a query, i.e., the answer that could be computed if all the tuples could be retrieved. A query is stable if for any instance of the relations in the query, its complete answer can be computed using the access patterns permitted by the relations. We study the problem of testing stability of various classes of queries, including conjunctive queries, unions of conjunctive queries, and conjunctive queries with arithmetic comparisons. We give algorithms and complexity results for these classes of queries. We show that stability of datalog programs is undecidable, and give a sufficient condition for stability of datalog queries. Finally, we study data-dependent computability of the complete answer to a nonstable query, and propose a decision tree for guiding the process to compute the complete answer.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information and Computer Science, University of California, CA 92697-3425, Irvine, USA

    Chen Li

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Correspondence to Chen Li.

Additional information

Received: 6 December 2001, Accepted: 25 November 2002, Published online: 3 April 2003

Chen Li: This article combines and integrates some content in the technical report at Stanford University [25] and the paper presented in the 8th International Conference on Database Theory (ICDT), London, UK, January, 2001 [28]. In addition to the prior materials, this article contains more results and complete proofs that were not included in the original reports.

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Li, C. Computing complete answers to queries in the presence of limited access patterns. VLDB 12, 211–227 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00778-002-0085-6

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