FLOC 2018: FEDERATED LOGIC CONFERENCE 2018
Automated Reasoning about Key Sets

Authors: Miika Hannula and Sebastian Link

Paper Information

Title:Automated Reasoning about Key Sets
Authors:Miika Hannula and Sebastian Link
Proceedings:IJCAR Proceedings 9th IJCAR, 2018
Editors: Stephan Schulz, Didier Galmiche and Roberto Sebastiani
Keywords:primary key, key set, axiomatization, automated reasoning, Armstrong relation
Abstract:

ABSTRACT. Codd's rule of entity integrity stipulates that every table in a database must have a primary key. This means that the attributes that form the primary key must carry no missing information and have unique value combinations. In practice, and in particular in modern applications, data records cannot always meet such requirements. Previous work has proposed the notion of a key set, which can identify more data records uniquely when information is missing. Apart from the proposal, key sets have not been investigated much further in the literature or in real systems. We outline important database applications, and investigate computational limits and techniques to reason automatically about key sets. We establish a binary axiomatization for the implication problem of key sets, and prove its coNP-completeness. In addition, we show that perfect models do not always exist for key sets. Finally, we show that the implication problem for unary key sets by arbitrary key sets has better computational properties. The fragment enjoys a unary axiomatization, is decidable in time quadratic in the input, and perfect models can always be generated.

Pages:16
Talk:Jul 17 11:30 (Session 119D: AR Miscellanea)
Paper: