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The Selfish Models Property: Bounding the Complexity of Query Containment and Entailment Problems

Published: 25 June 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Query containment is the fundamental problem of deciding, given two database queries, if the result of the first query is always contained in the result of the second query. For a number of established query classes, an instance of this problem can be decided by computing a set of models of the first query, and then evaluating the second query on each of the models. We formalize this phenomenon by introducing the selfish models property; this property gives an avenue for establishing both the decidability of and complexity upper bounds for containment problems. Using this property, we show how existing results can be uniformly derived, and we present two significant novel positive results for first-order query containment problems, exhibiting complexity upper bounds for containment problems that were not previously known to be decidable.

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cover image ACM Conferences
PODS '19: Proceedings of the 38th ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGAI Symposium on Principles of Database Systems
June 2019
494 pages
ISBN:9781450362276
DOI:10.1145/3294052
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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Published: 25 June 2019

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Author Tags

  1. computational complexity
  2. finite model theory
  3. query containment

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  • Research-article

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  • Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte

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SIGMOD/PODS '19
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SIGMOD/PODS '19: International Conference on Management of Data
June 30 - July 5, 2019
Amsterdam, Netherlands

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PODS '19 Paper Acceptance Rate 29 of 87 submissions, 33%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 642 of 2,707 submissions, 24%

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