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A Survey of the Data Complexity of Consistent Query Answering under Key Constraints

  • Conference paper
Foundations of Information and Knowledge Systems (FoIKS 2014)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 8367))

Abstract

This paper adopts a very elementary representation of uncertainty. A relational database is called uncertain if it can violate primary key constraints. A repair of an uncertain database is obtained by selecting a maximal number of tuples without selecting two distinct tuples of the same relation that agree on their primary key. For any Boolean query q, CERTAINTY(q) is the problem that takes an uncertain database db on input, and asks whether q is true in every repair of db. The complexity of these problems has been particularly studied for q ranging over the class of Boolean conjunctive queries. A research challenge is to solve the following complexity classification task: given q, determine whether CERTAINTY(q) belongs to complexity classes FO, P, or coNP-complete.

The counting variant of CERTAINTY(q), denoted \(\sharp\) CERTAINTY(q), asks to determine the exact number of repairs that satisfy q. This problem is related to query answering in probabilistic databases.

This paper motivates the problems CERTAINTY(q) and \(\sharp\) CERTAINTY(q), surveys the progress made in the study of their complexity, and lists open problems. We also show a new result comparing complexity boundaries of both problems with one another.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Université de Mons, Mons, Belgium

    Jef Wijsen

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  1. Jef Wijsen
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Fakultät für Mathematik und Informatik, FernUniversität in Hagen, Universitätstrasse 1, 58084, Hagen, Germany

    Christoph Beierle

  2. Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie della Informazione, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Via G. Moruzzi 1, 56124, Pisa, Italy

    Carlo Meghini

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Wijsen, J. (2014). A Survey of the Data Complexity of Consistent Query Answering under Key Constraints. In: Beierle, C., Meghini, C. (eds) Foundations of Information and Knowledge Systems. FoIKS 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8367. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04939-7_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04939-7_2

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-04938-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-04939-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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