During the past decade, there has been an extensive investigation of the computational complexity of the consistent answers of Boolean conjunctive queries under primary key constraints. Much of this investigation has focused on self-join-free Boolean conjunctive queries. In this paper, we study the consistent answers of Boolean conjunctive queries involving a single binary relation, i.e., we consider arbitrary Boolean conjunctive queries on directed graphs. In the presence of a single key constraint, we show that for each such Boolean conjunctive query, either the problem of computing its consistent answers is expressible in first-order logic, or it is polynomial-time solvable, but not expressible in first-order logic.
When a relational database is queried, the result is normally a relation. Some queries, however, only require a yes/no answer; such queries are often called boolean queries. It is customary in database theory to express boolean queries by testing nonemptiness of query expressions. Another interesting way for expressing boolean queries are containment statements of the form $Q_1 \subseteq Q_2$ where $Q_1$ and $Q_2$ are query expressions. Here, for any input instance $I$, the boolean query result is $\mathit{true}$ if $Q_1(I)$ is a subset of $Q_2(I)$ and $\mathit{false}$ otherwise. In the presen…
Single-round multiway join algorithms first reshuffle data over many servers and then evaluate the query at hand in a parallel and communication-free way. A key question is whether a given distribution policy for the reshuffle is adequate for computing a given query, also referred to as parallel-correctness. This paper extends the study of the complexity of parallel-correctness and its constituents, parallel-soundness and parallel-completeness, to unions of conjunctive queries with and without negation. As a by-product it is shown that the containment problem for conjunctive queries with negat…
The helping Lemma 7 in [Maslowski and Wijsen, ICDT, 2014] is false. The lemma is used in (and only in) the proof of Theorem 3 of that same paper. In this corrigendum, we provide a new proof for the latter theorem.
Conjunctive queries are the most basic and central class of database queries. With the continued growth of demands to manage and process the massive volume of different types of data, there is little research to study the conjunctive queries between relation and tree data. In this paper, we study of Cross-Model Conjunctive Queries (CMCQs) over relation and tree-structured data (XML and JSON). To efficiently process CMCQs with bounded intermediate results, we first encode tree nodes with position information. With tree node original label values and encoded position values, it allows our propos…
A dominant cost for query evaluation in modern massively distributed systems is the number of communication rounds. For this reason, there is a growing interest in single-round multiway join algorithms where data is first reshuffled over many servers and then evaluated in a parallel but communication-free way. The reshuffling itself is specified as a distribution policy. We introduce a correctness condition, called parallel-correctness, for the evaluation of queries w.r.t. a distribution policy. We study the complexity of parallel-correctness for conjunctive queries as well as transferability …
Estimating the cardinality (i.e., the number of answers) of conjunctive queries is particularly difficult in RDF systems: queries over RDF data are navigational and thus tend to involve many joins. We present a new, principled cardinality estimation technique based on graph summarisation. We interpret a summary of an RDF graph using a possible world semantics and formalise the estimation problem as computing the expected cardinality over all RDF graphs represented by the summary, and we present a closed-form formula for computing the expectation of arbitrary queries. We also discuss approaches…
Numerous fundamental database and reasoning problems are known to be NP-hard in general but tractable on instances where the underlying hypergraph structure is $β$-acyclic. Despite the importance of many of these problems, there has been little success in generalizing these results beyond acyclicity. In this paper, we take on this challenge and propose nest-set width, a novel generalization of hypergraph $β$-acyclicity. We demonstrate that nest-set width has desirable properties and algorithmic significance. In particular, evaluation of boolean conjunctive queries with negation is tractable fo…
In their classical 1993 paper [CV93] Chaudhuri and Vardi notice that some fundamental database theory results and techniques fail to survive when we try to see query answers as bags (multisets) of tuples rather than as sets of tuples. But disappointingly, almost 30 years after [CV93], the bag-semantics based database theory is still in its infancy. We do not even know whether conjunctive query containment is decidable. And this is not due to lack of interest, but because, in the multiset world, everything suddenly gets discouragingly complicated. In this paper, we try to re-examine, in the bag…
Even though query evaluation is a fundamental task in databases, known classifications of conjunctive queries by their fine-grained complexity only apply to queries without self-joins. We study how self-joins affect enumeration complexity, with the aim of building upon the known results to achieve general classifications. We do this by examining the extension of two known dichotomies: one with respect to linear delay, and one with respect to constant delay after linear preprocessing. As this turns out to be an intricate investigation, this paper is structured as an example-driven discussion th…
We study the problem of finding the worst-case bound for the size of the result $Q(\mathbb{ D})$ of a fixed conjunctive query $Q$ applied to a database $\mathbb{ D}$ satisfying given functional dependencies. We provide a precise characterization of this bound in terms of entropy vectors, and in terms of finite groups. In particular, we show that an upper bound provided by Gottlob, Lee, Valiant and Valiant is tight, answering a question from their paper. Our result generalizes the bound due to Atserias, Grohe and Marx, who consider the case without functional dependencies. Our result shows that…
We consider ontology-mediated queries (OMQs) based on expressive description logics of the ALC family and (unions) of conjunctive queries, studying the rewritability into OMQs based on instance queries (IQs). Our results include exact characterizations of when such a rewriting is possible and tight complexity bounds for deciding rewritability. We also give a tight complexity bound for the related problem of deciding whether a given MMSNP sentence is equivalent to a CSP.
A relational database is said to be uncertain if primary key constraints can possibly be violated. A repair (or possible world) of an uncertain database is obtained by selecting a maximal number of tuples without ever selecting two distinct tuples with the same primary key value. For any Boolean query q, CERTAINTY(q) is the problem that takes an uncertain database db on input, and asks whether q is true in every repair of db. The complexity of this problem has been particularly studied for q ranging over the class of self-join-free Boolean conjunctive queries. A research challenge is to determ…
Releasing the result size of conjunctive queries and graph pattern queries under differential privacy (DP) has received considerable attention in the literature, but existing solutions do not offer any optimality guarantees. We provide the first DP mechanism for this problem with a fairly strong notion of optimality, which can be considered as a natural relaxation of instance-optimality to a constant.
CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；University of Bremen（不来梅大学）；University of Liverpool（利物浦大学）
We study FO-rewritability of conjunctive queries in the presence of ontologies formulated in a description logic between EL and Horn-SHIF, along with related query containment problems. Apart from providing characterizations, we establish complexity results ranging from ExpTime via NExpTime to 2ExpTime, pointing out several interesting effects. In particular, FO-rewriting is more complex for conjunctive queries than for atomic queries when inverse roles are present, but not otherwise.
Answering Conjunctive Queries (CQs) and solving Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSPs) are arguably among the most fundamental tasks in Computer Science. They are classical NP-complete problems. Consequently, the search for tractable fragments of these problems has received a lot of research interest over the decades. This research has traditionally progressed along three orthogonal threads. a) Reformulating queries into simpler, equivalent, queries (semantic optimization) b) Bounding answer sizes based on structural properties of the query c) Decomposing the query in such a way that global c…
In this paper, we focus on the problem of determining whether two conjunctive ("CQ") queries posed on relational data are combined-semantics equivalent [9]. We continue the tradition of [2,5,9] of studying this problem using the tool of containment between queries. We introduce a syntactic necessary and sufficient condition for equivalence of queries belonging to a large natural language of "explicit-wave" combined-semantics CQ queries; this language encompasses (but is not limited to) all set, bag, and bag-set queries, and appears to cover all combined-semantics CQ queries that are expressibl…
We study the enumeration complexity of Unions of Conjunctive Queries(UCQs). We aim to identify the UCQs that are tractable in the sense that the answer tuples can be enumerated with a linear preprocessing phase and a constant delay between every successive tuples. It has been established that, in the absence of self-joins and under conventional complexity assumptions, the CQs that admit such an evaluation are precisely the free-connex ones. A union of tractable CQs is always tractable. We generalize the notion of free-connexity from CQs to UCQs, thus showing that some unions containing intract…
This note closes a minor gap in the literature on the counting complexity of conjunctive queries by showing that queries that are not free-connex do not have a linear time counting algorithm under standard complexity assumptions. More generally, it is shown that the so-called quantified star size is a lower bound for the exponent in the runtime of any counting algorithm for conjunctive queries.
Conjunctive queries are basic and heavily studied database queries; in relational algebra, they are the select-project-join queries. In this article, we study the fundamental problem of counting, given a conjunctive query and a relational database, the number of answers to the query on the database. In particular, we study the complexity of this problem relative to sets of conjunctive queries. We present a trichotomy theorem, which shows essentially that this problem on a set of conjunctive queries is either tractable, equivalent to the parameterized CLIQUE problem, or as hard as the parameter…
Let's Play Tag: Linear Time Evaluation of Conjunctive Queries under TGD Constraints
Inria, LIRMM, University of Montpellier, CNRS（法国国家信息与自动化研究所、LIRMM、蒙彼利埃大学、法国国家科学研究中心）；Leipzig University（莱比锡大学）；Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence (ScaDS.AI)（可扩展数据分析与人工智能中心）；Warsaw University（华沙大学）
We introduce the class CXRPQ of conjunctive xregex path queries, which are obtained from conjunctive regular path queries (CRPQs) by adding string variables (also called backreferences) as found in practical implementations of regular expressions. CXRPQs can be considered user-friendly, since they combine two concepts that are well-established in practice: pattern-based graph queries and regular expressions with backreferences. Due to the string variables, CXRPQs can express inter-path dependencies, which are not expressible by CRPQs. The evaluation complexity of CXRPQs, if not further restric…
The Shapley value is a conventional and well-studied function for determining the contribution of a player to the coalition in a cooperative game. Among its applications in a plethora of domains, it has recently been proposed to use the Shapley value for quantifying the contribution of a tuple to the result of a database query. In particular, we have a thorough understanding of the tractability frontier for the class of Conjunctive Queries (CQs) and aggregate functions over CQs. It has also been established that a tractable (randomized) multiplicative approximation exists for every union of CQ…
Relational queries, and in particular join queries, often generate large output results when executed over a huge dataset. In such cases, it is often infeasible to store the whole materialized output if we plan to reuse it further down a data processing pipeline. Motivated by this problem, we study the construction of space-efficient compressed representations of the output of conjunctive queries, with the goal of supporting the efficient access of the intermediate compressed result for a given access pattern. In particular, we initiate the study of an important tradeoff: minimizing the space …
Conjunctive path queries (CPQ) are one of the most frequently used queries for complex graph analysis. However, current graph indexes are not tailored to fully support the power of query languages to express CPQs. Consequently, current methods do not take advantage of significant pruning opportunities during \cpq{} evaluation, resulting in poor query processing performance. We propose the CPQ-aware path index CPQx, the first path index tailored to the expressivity of CPQ. CPQx is built on the partition of the set of source-target vertex pairs of paths in a graph based on the structural notion …
Universiteit van Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；Universitat Pompeu Fabra（庞培法布拉大学）
We answer the question which conjunctive queries are uniquely characterized by polynomially many positive and negative examples, and how to construct such examples efficiently. As a consequence, we obtain a new efficient exact learning algorithm for a class of conjunctive queries. At the core of our contributions lie two new polynomial-time algorithms for constructing frontiers in the homomorphism lattice of finite structures. We also discuss implications for the unique characterizability and learnability of schema mappings and of description logic concepts.
We study the tractability of conjunctive query answering for queries with unbounded arity. It is well known that tractability of the problem can be characterised in terms of the queries treewidth under the assumption of bounded arity. We extend this result to cases with unbounded arity but degree 2. To do so, we introduce hypergraph dilutions as an alternative method to primal graph minors for studying substructures of hypergraphs. Using dilutions we observe an analogue to the Excluded Grid Theorem for degree 2 hypergraphs. In consequence, we show that that the tractability of conjunctive quer…
Will My Favorite Chases Terminate if Evaluating Conjunctive Queries Does? One Does Not Simply Decide This
Inria, DI ENS, ENS, CNRS, PSL University（法国国家信息与自动化研究所，巴黎高等师范学院，法国国家科学研究中心，巴黎文理研究大学）；LIRMM, Inria, University of Montpellier, CNRS（蒙彼利埃大学与法国国家科学研究中心联合实验室，法国国家信息与自动化研究所，蒙彼利埃大学，法国国家科学研究中心）
Query evaluation over probabilistic databases is known to be intractable in many cases, even in data complexity, i.e., when the query is fixed. Although some restrictions of the queries [19] and instances [4] have been proposed to lower the complexity, these known tractable cases usually do not apply to combined complexity, i.e., when the query is not fixed. This leaves open the question of which query and instance languages ensure the tractability of probabilistic query evaluation in combined complexity. This paper proposes the first general study of the combined complexity of conjunctive que…
Intersection joins over interval data are relevant in spatial and temporal data settings. A set of intervals join if their intersection is non-empty. In case of point intervals, the intersection join becomes the standard equality join. We establish the complexity of Boolean conjunctive queries with intersection joins by a many-one equivalence to disjunctions of Boolean conjunctive queries with equality joins. The complexity of any query with intersection joins is that of the hardest query with equality joins in the disjunction exhibited by our equivalence. This is captured by a new width measu…
This thesis offers two logic-based approaches to conjunctive queries in the context of information extraction. The first and main approach is the introduction of conjunctive query fragments of the logics FC and FC[REG], denoted as FC-CQ and FC[REG]-CQ respectively. FC is a first-order logic based on word equations, where the semantics are defined by limiting the universe to the factors of some finite input word. FC[REG] is FC extended with regular constraints. The second approach is to consider the dynamic complexity of FC.
In this paper, we study the complexity of answering conjunctive queries (CQ) with inequalities). In particular, we are interested in comparing the complexity of the query with and without inequalities. The main contribution of our work is a novel combinatorial technique that enables us to use any Select-Project-Join query plan for a given CQ without inequalities in answering the CQ with inequalities, with an additional factor in running time that only depends on the query. The key idea is to define a new projection operator, which keeps a small representation (independent of the size of the da…
We investigate the computational complexity of minimizing the source side-effect in order to remove a given number of tuples from the output of a conjunctive query. In particular, given a multi-relational database $D$, a conjunctive query $Q$, and a positive integer $k$ as input, the goal is to find a minimum subset of input tuples to remove from D that would eliminate at least $k$ output tuples from $Q(D)$. This problem generalizes the well-studied deletion propagation problem in databases. In addition, it encapsulates the notion of intervention for aggregate queries used in data analysis wit…
The resilience of a Boolean query is the minimum number of tuples that need to be deleted from the input tables in order to make the query false. A solution to this problem immediately translates into a solution for the more widely known problem of deletion propagation with source-side effects. In this paper, we give several novel results on the hardness of the resilience problem for $\textit{binary conjunctive queries with self-joins}$ (i.e. conjunctive queries with relations of maximal arity 2) with one repeated relation. Unlike in the self-join free case, the concept of triad is not enough …
We investigate the computational complexity of minimizing the source side-effect in order to remove a given number of tuples from the output of a conjunctive query. This is a variant of the well-studied {\em deletion propagation} problem, the difference being that we are interested in removing the smallest subset of input tuples to remove a given number of output tuples} while deletion propagation focuses on removing a specific output tuple. We call this the {\em Aggregated Deletion Propagation} problem. We completely characterize the poly-time solvability of this problem for arbitrary conjunc…
Existential positive formulas form a fragment of first-order logic that includes and is semantically equivalent to unions of conjunctive queries, one of the most important and well-studied classes of queries in database theory. We consider the complexity of counting the number of answers to existential positive formulas on finite structures and give a trichotomy theorem on query classes, in the setting of bounded arity. This theorem generalizes and unifies several known results on the complexity of conjunctive queries and unions of conjunctive queries.
We propose an algorithm for answering conjunctive queries with negation, where the negated relations have bounded degree. Its data complexity matches that of the best known algorithms for the positive subquery of the input query and is expressed in terms of the fractional hypertree width and the submodular width. The query complexity depends on the structure of the negated subquery; in general it is exponential in the number of join variables occurring in negated relations yet it becomes polynomial for several classes of queries. This algorithm relies on several contributions. We show how to r…
Conjunctive database queries have been extended with a mechanism for object creation to capture important applications such as data exchange, data integration, and ontology-based data access. Object creation generates new object identifiers in the result, that do not belong to the set of constants in the source database. The new object identifiers can be also seen as Skolem terms. Hence, object-creating conjunctive queries can also be regarded as restricted second-order tuple-generating dependencies (SO tgds), considered in the data exchange literature. In this paper, we focus on the class of …
