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We deal with the problem of deciding whether a given set of string patterns implies the presence of a fixed pattern. While checking whether a set of patterns occurs in a string is solvable in polynomial time, this implication problem is well known to be intractable. Here we consider a version of the problem when patterns in the set are required to be disjoint. We show that for such a version of the problem the situation is reversed: checking whether a set of patterns occurs in a string is NP-complete, but the implication problem is solvable in polynomial time. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Locality notions in logic say that the truth value of a formula can be determined locally, by looking at the isomorphism type of a small neighbourhood of its free variables. Such notions have proved to be useful in many applications. They all, however, refer to isomorphisms of neighbourhoods, which most local logics cannot test. A stronger notion of locality says that the truth value of a formula is determined by what the logic itself can say about that small neighbourhood. Since the expressiveness of many logics can be characterized by games, one can also say that the truth value of a formula is determined by the type, with respect to a game, of that small neighbourhood. Such game-based notions of locality can often be applied when traditional isomorphism-based notions of locality cannot.Our goal is to study game-based notions of locality. We work with an abstract view of games that subsumes games for many logics. We look at three, progressively more complicated locality notions. The easiest requires only very mild conditions on the game and works for most logics of interest. The other notions, based on Hanf’s and Gaifman’s theorems, require more restrictions. We state those restrictions and give examples of logics that satisfy and fail the respective game-based notions of locality.

Collapse results, which are central for understanding constraint database queries, show that in terms of the expressive power, a large class of queries collapses to a much smaller one, typically involving only a restricted form of quantification. Most collapse results have been proved over constraints involving a linear order, and proofs are typically rather nontrivial. In this short note we give an easy proof of a powerful form of collapse for a large class of constraints without a linear order, namely those in which all basic relations are of small degree.

We study the problem of maintaining recursively defined views, such as the transitive closure of a relation, in traditional relational languages that do not have recursion mechanisms. The main results of this paper are negative ones: we show that a certain property of query languages implies impossibility of such incremental maintenance. The property we use is locality of queries, which is known to hold for relational calculus and various extensions, including those with grouping and aggregate constructs (essentially, plain SQL).

It is a folk result in database theory that SQL cannot express recursive queries such as reachability; in fact, a new construct was added to SQL3 to overcome this limitation. However, the evidence for this claim is usually given in the form of a reference to a proof that relational algebra cannot express such queries. SQL, on the other hand, in all its implementations has three features that fundamentally distinguish it from relational algebra: namely, grouping, arithmetic operations, and aggregation.In the past few years, most questions about the additional power provided by these features have been answered. This paper surveys those results, and presents new simple and self-contained proofs of the main results on the expressive power of SQL. Somewhat surprisingly, tiny differences in the language definition affect the results in a dramatic way: under some very natural assumptions, it can be proved that SQL cannot define recursive queries, no matter what aggregate functions and arithmetic operations are allowed. But relaxing these assumptions just a tiny bit makes the problem of proving expressivity bounds for SQL as hard as some long-standing open problems in complexity theory.

We investigate the problem of how to extend constraint query languages with aggregate operators. We deal with standard relational aggregation, and also with aggregates specific to spatial data, such as volume. We study several approaches, including the addition of a new class of approximate aggregate operators which allow an error tolerance in the computation. We show how techniques of M. Karpinski and A. Macintyre (in “Structures in Logic and Computer Science: A Selection of Essays in Honor of A. Ehrenfeucht,” Springer Lecture Notes on Computer Science 1261, pp. 162–173, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1997) and P. Koiran (in “FOCS '95,” pp. 134–141) based on VC-dimension can be used to give languages with approximation operators, but also show that these languages have a number of shortcomings. We then give a set of results showing that it is impossible to get constraint-based languages that admit definable aggregation operators, both for exact operators and for approximate ones. These results are quite robust, in that they show that closure under aggregation is problematic even when the class of functions permitted in constraints is expanded. This motivates a different approach to the aggregation problem. We introduce a language FO+Poly+Sum, which permits standard discrete aggregation operators to be applied to the outputs of range-restricted constraint queries. We show that this language has a number of attractive closure and expressivity properties, and that it can compute volumes of linear-constraint databases.

A formula p (x1,...,xn) conforms to a partition P of {x 1, ...,xn} if is equivalent to a Boolean combination of formulae that do not have free variables from more than one block of P. We show that if p conforms to two partitions P1 and P1 and P2, it also conforms to their greatest lower bound in the partition lattice. As a corollary, we obtain that the concept of orthographic dimension of a constraint-definable set, introduced in the field of constraint databases, is well-defined. 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

In this paper we study the expressiveness of local queries. By locality we mean — informally — that in order to check if a tuple belongs to the result of a query, one only has to look at a certain predetermined portion of the input. Examples include all relational calculus queries. We start by proving a general result describing outputs of local queries. This result leads to many easy inexpressibility proofs for local queries. We then consider a closely related property, namely, the bounded degree property. It describes the outputs of local queries on structures that locally look “simple.” Every query that is local is shown to have the bounded degree property. Since every relational calculus (first-order) query is local, the general results proved for local queries can be viewed as “off-the-shelf” strategies for proving inexpressibility results, which are often easier to apply than Ehrenfeucht–Fraı̈ssé games. We also show that some generalizations of the bounded degree property that were conjectured to hold, fail for relational calculus. We then prove that the language obtained from relational calculus by adding grouping and aggregates, which is essentially plain SQL, has the bounded degree property, thus answering a question that has been open for several years. Consequently, first-order queries with Härtig or Rescher quantifiers also have the bounded degree property. Finally, we apply our results to incremental maintenance of views, and show that SQL and relational calculus are incapable of maintaining the transitive closure view even in the presence of auxiliary relations of moderate degree.

Partial information in databases can arise when information from several databases is combined. Even if each database is complete for some “world”, the combined databases will not be, and answers to queries against such combined databases can only be approximated. In this paper we describe various situations in which a precise answer cannot be obtained for a query asked against multiple databases. Based on an analysis of these situations, we propose a classification of constructs that can be used to model approximations. The main goal of the paper is to study several formal models of approximations and their semantics. In particular, we obtain universality properties for these models of approximations. Universality properties suggest syntax for languages with approximations based on the operations which are naturally associated with them. We prove universality properties for most of the approximation constructs. Then we design languages built around datatypes given by the approximation constructs. A straightforward approach results in languages that have a number of limitations. In an attempt to overcome those limitations, we explain how all the languages can be embedded into a language for conjunctive and disjunctive sets from Libkin and Wong (1996) and demonstrate its usefulness in querying independent databases. We also discuss the semantics of approximation constructs and the relationship between them.

Theoretical foundations for querying databases based on bags are studied in this paper. We fully determine the strength of many polynomial-time bag operators relative to an ambient query language. Then we obtain BQL, a query language for bags, by picking the strongest combination of these operators. The relationship between the nested relational algebra and various fragments of BQL is investigated. The precise amount of extra power that BQL possesses over the nested relational algebra is determined. It is shown that the additional expressiveness of BQL amounts to adding aggregate functions to a relational language. The expressive power of BQL and related languages is investigated in depth. We prove that these languages possess the conservative extension property. That is, the expressibility of queries in these languages is independent of the nesting height of intermediate data. Using this result, we show that recursive queries, such as transitive closure, are not definable in BQL. A new tool for analyzing expressibility, called the bounded degree property, is also introduced and we show how it can be used on relational languages. To enhance the expressiveness of BQL, we consider nonpolynomial primitives such aspowerbag, structural recursion, and bounded loop. Structural recursion on bags is shown to be equivalent to the bounded loop operator and strictly more powerful than thepowerbagprimitive. We show that the class of numerical functions expressible in BQL augmented by structural recursion is precisely the class of primitive recursive functions.

We extend the approach to representation of partial information based on orderings on objects from sets to multisets. We characterize orderings arising under closed- and open-world assumptions and analyze their complexity. In contrast to the set case, where orderings are first-order definable and are thus expressible in standard database query languages, the orderings on bags are not expressible in standard bag languages. We give an example of a query on nested relations whose inexpressibility in the extension of relational algebra to nested objects cannot be proved by reduction to the first-order case.

We study semilattices whose diagrams are trees. First, we characterize them as semilattices whose convex subsemilattices form a convex geometry, or, equivalently, the closure induced by convex subsemilattices is antiexchange. Then we give lattice theoretic and two graph theoretic characterizations of atomistic semilattices with tree diagrams.

Queries in nested relational calculus are independent of the depth of set nesting in the intermediate data, even in the presence of aggregate functions. We prove that this continues to be true if the calculus is augmented with any internal generic family of functions.

A lattice theoretic approach is developed to study the properties of functional dependencies in relational databases. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of the semilattice of closed sets, the lattice of all closure operations on a given set and to a new characterization of normal form relation schemes. Relation schemes with restrictions on functional dependencies are also studied.

A matrix A is said to be absolutely determined if all its submatrices, including A itself, have saddle-points. In this paper the properties of absolutely determined matrices are studied. The one- to-one correspondence between symmetrical absolutely determined matrices and so-called quasilinear set functions is constructed. This correspondence is generalized to the functions on arbitrary finite semilattices. Some estimates on the number of absolutely determined matrices are established.

A characterization theorem for algebraic bounded complete cpos is proved similar to that for algebraic lattices.