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Certain conjunctive query answering in first-order logic

Published: 04 June 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Primary key violations provide a natural means for modeling uncertainty in the relational data model. 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, the problem CERTAINTY(q) 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 AC°). 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 (in the sense of Beeri et al. [1983]), 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 Transactions on Database Systems
ACM Transactions on Database Systems  Volume 37, Issue 2
May 2012
326 pages
ISSN:0362-5915
EISSN:1557-4644
DOI:10.1145/2188349
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 04 June 2012
Accepted: 01 December 2011
Revised: 01 October 2011
Received: 01 May 2011
Published in TODS Volume 37, Issue 2

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Author Tags

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

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  • (2022)Consistent Subgraph Matching over Large Graphs2022 IEEE 38th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE)10.1109/ICDE53745.2022.00235(2536-2548)Online publication date: May-2022
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  • (2020)First-Order Rewritability in Consistent Query Answering with Respect to Multiple KeysProceedings of the 39th ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGAI Symposium on Principles of Database Systems10.1145/3375395.3387654(113-129)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2020
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