FLOC 2018: FEDERATED LOGIC CONFERENCE 2018
Can One Escape Red Chains? Regular Path Queries Determinacy is Undecidable.

Authors: Grzegorz Głuch, Jerzy Marcinkowski and Piotr Ostropolski-Nalewaja

Paper Information

Title:Can One Escape Red Chains? Regular Path Queries Determinacy is Undecidable.
Authors:Grzegorz Głuch, Jerzy Marcinkowski and Piotr Ostropolski-Nalewaja
Proceedings:LICS PDF files
Editors: Anuj Dawar and Erich Grädel
Keywords:database theory, query, view, determinacy
Abstract:

ABSTRACT. For a given set of queries (which are formulae in some query language) {Q_1, Q_2, ... Q_k} and for another query Q we say that {Q_1, Q_2, ... Q_k} determines Q if -- informally speaking -- for every database D, the information contained in the views Q_1(D), Q_2(D), ... Q_k(D) is sufficient to compute Q(D).

Query Determinacy Problem is the problem of deciding, for given {Q_1, Q_2, ... Q_k} and Q whether {Q_1, Q_2, ... Q_k} determines Q.

Many versions of this problem, for different query languages, were studied in database theory. In this paper we solve a problem stated in [CGLV02] showing that Query Determinacy Problem is undecidable for the Regular Path Queries -- the paradigmatic query language of graph databases.

--------- [CGLV02] D. Calvanese, G. De Giacomo, M. Lenzerini, and M.Y. Vardi; Lossless regular views; Proc. of the twenty-first ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT- SIGART symposium on Principles of Database Systems, PODS 2002

Pages:10
Talk:Jul 11 12:20 (Session 64D)
Paper: