On the convergence of query evaluation

Foto Afrati*, Christos H. Papadimitriou, George Papageorgiou, Athena Roussou, Yehoshua Sagiv, Jeffrey D. Ullman

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

6 Scopus citations

Abstract

We propose a "sideways information passing" method for evaluating Horn clause queries in the presence of monotonicity constraints on the database relations. We give a necessary and sufficient condition for its convergence and show that testing for the condition is polynomial when the arity of the relations is bounded, and PSPACE-complete otherwise. We also prove a related condition for the case of downward finite domains (e.g., Herbrand universes), thus improving an algorithm by Naish for a class of Prolog programs.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)341-359
Number of pages19
JournalJournal of Computer and System Sciences
Volume38
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - Apr 1989

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