We study the $generalized~model~counting~problem$, defined as follows: given a database, and a set of deterministic tuples, count the number of subsets of the database that include all deterministic tuples and satisfy the query. This problem is computationally equivalent to the evaluation of the query over a tuple-independent probabilistic database where all tuples have probabilities in $\{0,\frac{1}{2},1\}$. Previous work has established a dichotomy for Unions of Conjunctive Queries (UCQ) when the probabilities are arbitrary rational numbers, showing that, for each query, its complexity is either in polynomial time or #P-hard. The query is called $safe$ in the first case, and $unsafe$ in the second case. Here, we strengthen the hardness proof, by proving that an unsafe UCQ query remains #P-hard even if the probabilities are restricted to $\{0,\frac{1}{2},1\}$. This requires a complete redesign of the hardness proof, using new techniques. A related problem is the $model~counting~problem$, which asks for the probability of the query when the input probabilities are restricted to $\{0,\frac{1}{2}\}$. While our result does not extend to model counting for all unsafe UCQs, we prove that model counting is #P-hard for a class of unsafe queries called Type-I forbidden queries.
We study the complexity of enumerating the answers of Conjunctive Queries (CQs) in the presence of Functional Dependencies (FDs). Our focus is on the ability to list output tuples with a constant delay in between, following a linear-time preprocessing. A known dichotomy classifies the acyclic self-join-free CQs into those that admit such enumeration, and those that do not. However, this classification no longer holds in the common case where the database exhibits dependencies among attributes. That is, some queries that are classified as hard are in fact tractable if dependencies are accounted…
Several research thrusts in the area of data management have focused on understanding how changes in the data affect the output of a view or standing query. Example applications are explaining query results, propagating updates through views, and anonymizing datasets. These applications usually rely on understanding how interventions in a database impact the output of a query. An important aspect of this analysis is the problem of deleting a minimum number of tuples from the input tables to make a given Boolean query false. We refer to this problem as "the resilience of a query" and show its c…
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…
We study the problem of consistent query answering under primary key violations. In this setting, the relations in a database violate the key constraints and we are interested in maximal subsets of the database that satisfy the constraints, which we call repairs. For a boolean query Q, the problem CERTAINTY(Q) asks whether every such repair satisfies the query or not; the problem is known to be always in coNP for conjunctive queries. However, there are queries for which it can be solved in polynomial time. It has been conjectured that there exists a dichotomy on the complexity of CERTAINTY(Q) …
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…
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 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 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…
We study the boundedness problem for unions of conjunctive regular path queries with inverses (UC2RPQs). This is the problem of, given a UC2RPQ, checking whether it is equivalent to a union of conjunctive queries (UCQ). We show the problem to be ExpSpace-complete, thus coinciding with the complexity of containment for UC2RPQs. As a corollary, when a UC2RPQ is bounded, it is equivalent to a UCQ of at most triple-exponential size, and in fact we show that this bound is optimal. We also study better behaved classes of UC2RPQs, namely acyclic UC2RPQs of bounded thickness, and strongly connected UC…
As data analytics becomes more crucial to digital systems, so grows the importance of characterizing the database queries that admit a more efficient evaluation. We consider the tractability yardstick of answer enumeration with a polylogarithmic delay after a linear-time preprocessing phase. Such an evaluation is obtained by constructing, in the preprocessing phase, a data structure that supports polylogarithmic-delay enumeration. In this paper, we seek a structure that supports the more demanding task of a "random permutation": polylogarithmic-delay enumeration in truly random order. Enumerat…
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…
Reverse engineering problems for conjunctive queries (CQs), such as query by example (QBE) or definability, take a set of user examples and convert them into an explanatory CQ. Despite their importance, the complexity of these problems is prohibitively high (coNEXPTIME-complete). We isolate their two main sources of complexity and propose relaxations of them that reduce the complexity while having meaningful theoretical interpretations. The first relaxation is based on the idea of using existential pebble games for approximating homomorphism tests. We show that this characterizes QBE/definabil…
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…
We study the complexity of consistent query answering on databases that may violate primary key constraints. A repair of such a database is any consistent database that can be obtained by deleting a minimal set of tuples. For every Boolean query q, CERTAINTY(q) is the problem that takes a database as input and asks whether q evaluates to true on every repair. In [KW17], the authors show that for every self-join-free Boolean conjunctive query q, the problem CERTAINTY(q) is either in P or coNP-complete, and it is decidable which of the two cases applies. In this paper, we sharpen this result by …
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…
Cardiff University（卡迪夫大学）；University of Warsaw（华沙大学）
We investigate the problem of finite entailment of ontology-mediated queries. We consider the expressive query language, unions of conjunctive regular path queries (UCRPQs), extending the well-known class of union of conjunctive queries, with regular expressions over roles. We look at ontologies formulated using the description logic ALC, and show a tight 2EXPTIME upper bound for entailment of UCRPQs. At the core of our decision procedure, there is a novel automata-based technique introducing a stratification of interpretations induced by the deterministic finite automaton underlying the input…
We consider the task of enumerating and counting answers to $k$-ary conjunctive queries against relational databases that may be updated by inserting or deleting tuples. We exhibit a new notion of q-hierarchical conjunctive queries and show that these can be maintained efficiently in the following sense. During a linear time preprocessing phase, we can build a data structure that enables constant delay enumeration of the query results; and when the database is updated, we can update the data structure and restart the enumeration phase within constant time. For the special case of self-join fre…
A well-established and fundamental insight in database theory is that negation (also known as complementation) tends to make queries difficult to process and difficult to reason about. Many basic problems are decidable and admit practical algorithms in the case of unions of conjunctive queries, but become difficult or even undecidable when queries are allowed to contain negation. Inspired by recent results in finite model theory, we consider a restricted form of negation, guarded negation. We introduce a fragment of SQL, called GN-SQL, as well as a fragment of Datalog with stratified negation,…
Marx (STOC~2010, J.~ACM 2013) introduced the notion of submodular width of a conjunctive query (CQ) and showed that for any class $Φ$ of Boolean CQs of bounded submodular width, the model-checking problem for $Φ$ on the class of all finite structures is fixed-parameter tractable (FPT). Note that for non-Boolean queries, the size of the query result may be far too large to be computed entirely within FPT time. We investigate the free-connex variant of submodular width and generalise Marx's result to non-Boolean queries as follows: For every class $Φ$ of CQs of bounded free-connex submodular wid…
Since 2005, significant progress has been made in the problem of Consistent Query Answering (CQA) with respect to primary keys. In this problem, the input is a database instance that may violate one or more primary key constraints. A repair is defined as a maximal subinstance that satisfies all primary keys. Given a Boolean query q, the question then is whether q holds true in every repair. So far, theoretical research in this field has not addressed the combination of primary key and foreign key constraints, despite the importance of referential integrity in database systems. This paper addre…
Tool SPECS implements an efficient automated approach for reasoning about the SPARQL query containment problem. In this paper, we prove the correctness of this approach. We give precise semantics of the core subset of SPARQL language. We briefly discuss the procedure used for reducing the query containment problem into a formal logical framework. We prove that such reduction is both sound and complete for conjunctive queries, and also for some important cases of non-conjunctive queries containing operator union, operator optional, and subqueries. Soundness and completeness proofs are considere…
The article investigates classes of queries maintainable by conjunctive queries (CQs) and their extensions and restrictions in the dynamic complexity framework of Patnaik and Immerman. Starting from the basic language of quantifier-free conjunctions of positive atoms, it studies the impact of additional operators and features - such as union, atomic negation and quantification - on the dynamic expressiveness, for the standard semantics as well as for Delta-semantics. Although many different combinations of these features are possible, they basically yield five important fragments for the stand…
Tianjin University（天津大学）；Western Sydney University（西悉尼大学）；Huazhong University of Technology and Science（华中科技大学）；University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）；Nankai University（南开大学）
An ontology language for ontology mediated query answering (OMQA-language) is universal for a family of OMQA-languages if it is the most expressive one among this family. In this paper, we focus on three families of tractable OMQA-languages, including first-order rewritable languages and languages whose data complexity of the query answering is in AC0 or PTIME. On the negative side, we prove that there is, in general, no universal language for each of these families of languages. On the positive side, we propose a novel property, the locality, to approximate the first-order rewritability, and …
An inconsistent database is a database that violates one or more integrity constraints, such as functional dependencies. Consistent Query Answering is a rigorous and principled approach to the semantics of queries posed against inconsistent databases. The consistent answers to a query on an inconsistent database is the intersection of the answers to the query on every repair, i.e., on every consistent database that differs from the given inconsistent one in a minimal way. Computing the consistent answers of a fixed conjunctive query on a given inconsistent database can be a coNP-hard problem, …
University of Liverpool（利物浦大学）；University of Bremen（不来梅大学）
We study the complexity of ontology-mediated querying when ontologies are formulated in the guarded fragment of first-order logic (GF). Our general aim is to classify the data complexity on the level of ontologies where query evaluation w.r.t. an ontology O is considered to be in PTime if all (unions of conjunctive) queries can be evaluated in PTime w.r.t. O and coNP-hard if at least one query is coNP-hard w.r.t. O. We identify several large and relevant fragments of GF that enjoy a dichotomy between PTime and coNP, some of them additionally admitting a form of counting. In fact, almost all on…
Evaluating a Boolean conjunctive query Q against a guarded first-order theory F is equivalent to checking whether "F and not Q" is unsatisfiable. This problem is relevant to the areas of database theory and description logic. Since Q may not be guarded, well known results about the decidability, complexity, and finite-model property of the guarded fragment do not obviously carry over to conjunctive query answering over guarded theories, and had been left open in general. By investigating finite guarded bisimilar covers of hypergraphs and relational structures, and by substantially generalising…
Ontological queries are evaluated against a knowledge base consisting of an extensional database and an ontology (i.e., a set of logical assertions and constraints which derive new intensional knowledge from the extensional database), rather than directly on the extensional database. The evaluation and optimization of such queries is an intriguing new problem for database research. In this paper, we discuss two important aspects of this problem: query rewriting and query optimization. Query rewriting consists of the compilation of an ontological query into an equivalent first-order query again…
Ontological queries are evaluated against an ontology rather than directly on a database. The evaluation and optimization of such queries is an intriguing new problem for database research. In this paper we discuss two important aspects of this problem: query rewriting and query optimization. Query rewriting consists of the compilation of an ontological query into an equivalent query against the underlying relational database. The focus here is on soundness and completeness. We review previous results and present a new rewriting algorithm for rather general types of ontological constraints. In…
We study the uniform query reliability problem, which asks, for a fixed Boolean query Q, given an instance I, how many subinstances of I satisfy Q. Equivalently, this is a restricted case of Boolean query evaluation on tuple-independent probabilistic databases where all facts must have probability 1/2. We focus on graph signatures, and on queries closed under homomorphisms. We show that for any such query that is unbounded, i.e., not equivalent to a union of conjunctive queries, the uniform reliability problem is #P-hard. This recaptures the hardness, e.g., of s-t connectedness, which counts h…
Constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) are an important formal framework for the uniform treatment of various prominent AI tasks, e.g., coloring or scheduling problems. Solving CSPs is, in general, known to be NP-complete and fixed-parameter intractable when parameterized by their constraint scopes. We give a characterization of those classes of CSPs for which the problem becomes fixed-parameter tractable. Our characterization significantly increases the utility of the CSP framework by making it possible to decide the fixed-parameter tractability of problems via their CSP formulations. We fur…
In data management, and in particular in data integration, data exchange, query optimization, and data privacy, the notion of view plays a central role. In several contexts, such as data integration, data mashups, and data warehousing, the need arises of designing views starting from a set of known correspondences between queries over different schemas. In this paper we deal with the issue of automating such a design process. We call this novel problem "view synthesis from schema mappings": given a set of schema mappings, each relating a query over a source schema to a query over a target sche…
Leipzig University（莱比锡大学）；University of Bremen（不来梅大学）
We study the evaluation of ontology-mediated queries (OMQs) on databases of bounded cliquewidth from the viewpoint of parameterized complexity theory. As the ontology language, we consider the description logics $\mathcal{ALC}$ and $\mathcal{ALCI}$ as well as the guarded two-variable fragment GF$_2$ of first-order logic. Queries are atomic queries (AQs), conjunctive queries (CQs), and unions of CQs. All studied OMQ problems are fixed-parameter linear (FPL) when the parameter is the size of the OMQ plus the cliquewidth. Our main contribution is a detailed analysis of the dependence of the runni…
Millennium Institute for Foundational Research on Data（千年基础数据研究研究所）；University of Chile（智利大学）；TU Wien（维也纳工业大学）；University of Bremen（不来梅大学）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）
We focus on ontology-mediated queries (OMQs) based on (frontier-)guarded existential rules and (unions of) conjunctive queries, and we investigate the problem of FO-rewritability, i.e., whether an OMQ can be rewritten as a first-order query. We adopt two different approaches. The first approach employs standard two-way alternating parity tree automata. Although it does not lead to a tight complexity bound, it provides a transparent solution based on widely known tools. The second approach relies on a sophisticated automata model, known as cost automata. This allows us to show that our problem …
