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On the first-order expressibility of computing certain answers to conjunctive queries over uncertain databases

Published: 06 June 2010 Publication History

Abstract

A natural way for capturing uncertainty in the relational data model is by having relations that violate their primary key constraint, that is, relations in which distinct tuples agree on the primary key. A repair (or possible world) of a database is then obtained by selecting a maximal number of tuples without ever selecting two distinct tuples that have the same primary key value. For a Boolean query q, CERTAINTY(q) is the problem that takes as input a database db and asks whether q evaluates to true on every repair of db. We are interested in determining queries q for which CERTAINTY(q) is first-order expressible (and hence in the low complexity class AC0).
For queries q in the class of conjunctive queries without self-join, we provide a necessary syntactic condition for first-order expressibility of CERTAINTY(q). For acyclic queries, this necessary condition is also a sufficient condition. So we obtain a decision procedure for first-order expressibility of CERTAINTY(q) when q is acyclic and without self-join. We also show that if CERTAINTY(q) is first-order expressible, its first-order definition, commonly called (certain) first-order rewriting, can be constructed in a rather straightforward way.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      PODS '10: Proceedings of the twenty-ninth ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGART symposium on Principles of database systems
      June 2010
      350 pages
      ISBN:9781450300339
      DOI:10.1145/1807085
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      Published: 06 June 2010

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      Author Tags

      1. conjunctive queries
      2. consistent query answering
      3. first-order expressibility
      4. primary keys

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      SIGMOD/PODS '10
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      SIGMOD/PODS '10: International Conference on Management of Data
      June 6 - 11, 2010
      Indiana, Indianapolis, USA

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      PODS '10 Paper Acceptance Rate 27 of 113 submissions, 24%;
      Overall Acceptance Rate 642 of 2,707 submissions, 24%

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      • (2024)Consistent Query Answering for Primary Keys on Rooted Tree QueriesProceedings of the ACM on Management of Data10.1145/36511392:2(1-26)Online publication date: 14-May-2024
      • (2024)Playing Guess Who with Your Kids: Code-Word Strategy Against AdversariesTheoretical Computer Science10.1016/j.tcs.2024.114766(114766)Online publication date: Aug-2024
      • (2023)LinCQA: Faster Consistent Query Answering with Linear Time GuaranteesProceedings of the ACM on Management of Data10.1145/35887181:1(1-25)Online publication date: 30-May-2023
      • (2022)A Dichotomy in Consistent Query Answering for Primary Keys and Unary Foreign KeysProceedings of the 41st ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGAI Symposium on Principles of Database Systems10.1145/3517804.3524157(437-449)Online publication date: 12-Jun-2022
      • (2022)Consistent Answers of Aggregation Queries via SAT2022 IEEE 38th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE)10.1109/ICDE53745.2022.00074(924-937)Online publication date: May-2022
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      • (2021)Consistent Query Answering for Primary Keys on Path QueriesProceedings of the 40th ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGAI Symposium on Principles of Database Systems10.1145/3452021.3458334(215-232)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2021
      • (2021)Efficient Uncertainty Tracking for Complex Queries with Attribute-level BoundsProceedings of the 2021 International Conference on Management of Data10.1145/3448016.3452791(528-540)Online publication date: 9-Jun-2021
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