Maintaining Global Integrity Constraints in DistributedDatabases

  • Authors:
  • Nam Huyn

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, Stanford University, Stanford, California, 94305, USA. E-mail: huyn@cs.stanford.edu

  • Venue:
  • Constraints
  • Year:
  • 1998

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Abstract

Given some integrity constraints over a distributeddatabase, we consider the problem of incrementally checking globalconsistency in response to updates made to the base relationsbut without accessing all these base relations. In many applicationareas such as collaborative design, mobile computing and enterpriseinformation systems, total data availability cannot be assumed.Even if all the base data is available, some of it may incursuch a high cost that its use should only be considered as alast resort. Without looking at all the relations that participatein the constraint, how can one meaningfully check a constraintfor violation? When the constraint is known to be satisfied priorto the update, the state of the relations that are available(aka local) can in principle be used to infer something aboutthe relations that are not available (aka remote). This observationis the basis for the existence of tests that guarantee that globalconsistency is preserved under a given update, without lookingat all the base data. In order to make consistency maintenance practical, the challenge is to find those tests that are mostgeneral (we call Complete Local Tests) and that are efficientto generate and execute. This paper addresses the problem offinding efficient complete local tests for an important classof constraints that are very common in practice: constraintsexpressible as conjunctive queries with negated subgoals. Forconstraints where the predicates for the remote relations donot occur more than once, we present complete local tests underinsertions and deletions to the local relations. These testscan be expressed as safe, nonrecursive Datalog ¬queries against the local relations. These results also applyto other constraints with negation that are not conjunctive.