Equivalence of queries that are sensitive to multiplicities

  • Authors:

  • Sara Cohen

  • Affiliations:

  • The Selim and Rachel Benin School of Engineering and Computer Science, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel 91094

  • Venue:
  • The VLDB Journal — The International Journal on Very Large Data Bases
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

The query equivalence problem has been studied extensively for set-semantics and, more recently, for bag and bag-set semantics. However, SQL queries often combine set, bag and bag-set semantics. For example, an SQL query that returns a multiset of elements may call a subquery or view that returns a set of elements. Queries may access both relations that do not contain duplicates, as well as relations with duplicates. As another example, in SQL one can compute a multiset-union of queries, each of which returns a set of answers. This paper presents combined semantics, which formally models query evaluation combining set, bag and bag-set semantics. The equivalence problem for queries evaluated under combined semantics is studied. A sufficient condition for equivalence is presented. For several important common classes of queries necessary and sufficient conditions for equivalence are presented.