Rewriting conjunctive queries determined by views

  • Authors:

  • Foto Afrati

  • Affiliations:

  • National Technical University of Athens, Greece

  • Venue:
  • MFCS'07 Proceedings of the 32nd international conference on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Answering queries using views is the problem which examines how to derive the answers to a query when we only have the answers to a set of views. Constructing rewritings is a widely studied technique to derive those answers. In this paper we consider the problem of existence of rewritings in the case where the answers to the views uniquely determine the answers to the query. Specifically, we say that a view set V determines a query Q if for any two databases D1,D2 it holds: V(D1) = V(D2) implies Q(D1) = Q(D2). We consider the case where query and views are defined by conjunctive queries and investigate the question: If a view set V determines a query Q, is there an equivalent rewriting of Q using V? We present here interesting cases where there are such rewritings in the language of conjunctive queries. Interestingly, we identify a class of conjunctive queries, CQpath, for which a view set can produce equivalent rewritings for "almost all" queries which are determined by this view set. We introduce a problem which relates determinacy to query equivalence. We show that there are cases where restricted results can carry over to broader classes of queries.