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Consistent Query Answering for Self-Join-Free Conjunctive Queries Under Primary Key Constraints

Authors:

Paraschos Koutris,

Jef WijsenAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS), Volume 42, Issue 2

Article No.: 9, Pages 1 - 45

https://doi.org/10.1145/3068334

Published: 01 June 2017 Publication History

Abstract

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 as 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 determine, given q, whether CERTAINTY(q) belongs to complexity classes FO, P, or coNP-complete.

In this article, we combine existing techniques for studying this complexity classification task. We show that, for any self-join-free Boolean conjunctive query q, it can be decided whether or not CERTAINTY(q) is in FO. We additionally show how to construct a single SQL query for solving CERTAINTY(q) if it is in FO. Further, for any self-join-free Boolean conjunctive query q, CERTAINTY(q) is either in P or coNP-complete and the complexity dichotomy is effective. This settles a research question that has been open for 10 years.

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Cited By

Koutris POuyang XWijsen J(2024)Consistent Query Answering for Primary Keys on Rooted Tree QueriesProceedings of the ACM on Management of Data10.1145/36511392:2(1-26)Online publication date: 14-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3651139
Padmanabha ASegoufin LSirangelo C(2024)A Dichotomy in the Complexity of Consistent Query Answering for Two Atom Queries With Self-JoinProceedings of the ACM on Management of Data10.1145/36511372:2(1-15)Online publication date: 14-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3651137
Kimelfeld BKolaitis P(2024)A Unifying Framework for Incompleteness, Inconsistency, and Uncertainty in DatabasesCommunications of the ACM10.1145/362471767:3(74-83)Online publication date: 22-Feb-2024
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Index Terms

Consistent Query Answering for Self-Join-Free Conjunctive Queries Under Primary Key Constraints
1. Information systems
  1. Data management systems
    1. Query languages
      1. Relational database query languages
2. Theory of computation
  1. Theory and algorithms for application domains
    1. Database theory

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Database Systems

ACM Transactions on Database Systems Volume 42, Issue 2

Invited Paper from SIGMOD 2015, Invited Paper from PODS 2015 and Regular Papers

June 2017

251 pages

ISSN:0362-5915

EISSN:1557-4644

DOI:10.1145/3086510

Editor:
Christian S. Jensen
Aalborg University, Denmark

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Copyright © 2017 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 01 June 2017

Accepted: 01 March 2017

Revised: 01 September 2016

Received: 01 December 2015

Published in TODS Volume 42, Issue 2

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Cited By

Koutris POuyang XWijsen J(2024)Consistent Query Answering for Primary Keys on Rooted Tree QueriesProceedings of the ACM on Management of Data10.1145/36511392:2(1-26)Online publication date: 14-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3651139
Padmanabha ASegoufin LSirangelo C(2024)A Dichotomy in the Complexity of Consistent Query Answering for Two Atom Queries With Self-JoinProceedings of the ACM on Management of Data10.1145/36511372:2(1-15)Online publication date: 14-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3651137
Kimelfeld BKolaitis P(2024)A Unifying Framework for Incompleteness, Inconsistency, and Uncertainty in DatabasesCommunications of the ACM10.1145/362471767:3(74-83)Online publication date: 22-Feb-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3624717
Fan ZKoutris POuyang XWijsen J(2023)LinCQA: Faster Consistent Query Answering with Linear Time GuaranteesProceedings of the ACM on Management of Data10.1145/35887181:1(1-25)Online publication date: 30-May-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3588718
Hannula MWijsen JLibkin LBarceló P(2022)A Dichotomy in Consistent Query Answering for Primary Keys and Unary Foreign KeysProceedings of the 41st ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGAI Symposium on Principles of Database Systems10.1145/3517804.3524157(437-449)Online publication date: 12-Jun-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3517804.3524157
Dixit AKolaitis P(2022)Consistent Answers of Aggregation Queries via SAT2022 IEEE 38th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE)10.1109/ICDE53745.2022.00074(924-937)Online publication date: May-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICDE53745.2022.00074
Miao DZhang PLi JWang YCai Z(2022)Approximation and inapproximability results on computing optimal repairsThe VLDB Journal — The International Journal on Very Large Data Bases10.1007/s00778-022-00738-032:1(173-197)Online publication date: 12-Apr-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s00778-022-00738-0
Koutris POuyang XWijsen JLibkin LPichler RGuagliardo P(2021)Consistent Query Answering for Primary Keys on Path QueriesProceedings of the 40th ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGAI Symposium on Principles of Database Systems10.1145/3452021.3458334(215-232)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3452021.3458334
Livshits EKochirgan RTsur SIlyas IKimelfeld BRoy SLi GLi ZIdreos SSrivastava D(2021)Properties of Inconsistency Measures for DatabasesProceedings of the 2021 International Conference on Management of Data10.1145/3448016.3457310(1182-1194)Online publication date: 9-Jun-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3448016.3457310
Dixit AKolaitis PLi GLi ZIdreos SSrivastava D(2021)CAvSAT: Answering Aggregation Queries over Inconsistent Databases via SAT SolvingProceedings of the 2021 International Conference on Management of Data10.1145/3448016.3452749(2701-2705)Online publication date: 9-Jun-2021
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