A Uniform Fixpoint Approach to the Implementation of Inference Methods for Deductive Databases

Abstract

Within the research area of deductive databases three different database tasks have been deeply investigated: query evaluation, update propagation and view updating. Over the last thirty years various inference mechanisms have been proposed for realizing these main functionalities of a rule-based system. However, these inference mechanisms have been rarely used in commercial DB systems until now. One important reason for this is the lack of a uniform approach well-suited for implementation in an SQL-based system. In this paper, we present such a uniform approach in form of a new version of the soft consequence operator. Additionally, we present improved transformation-based approaches to query optimization and update propagation and view updating which are all using this operator as underlying evaluation mechanism.

to appear in the Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Applications of Declarative Programming and Knowledge Management (INAP 2011)