Abstract
We address the problem of formalizing the evolution of a database under the effect of an arbitrary sequence of update transactions. We do so by appealing to a first order representation language called the situation calculus, which is a standard approach in artificial intelligence to the formalization of planning problems. We formalize database transactions in exactly the same way as actions in the artificial intelligence planning domain. This leads to a database version of the frame problem in artificial intelligence. We provide a solution to the frame problem for a special, but substantial, class of update transactions.
We next briefly describe some of the results obtained within this axiomatization. Specifically, we provide procedures for determining whether a given sequence of update transactions is legal, and for query evaluation in an updated database. These procedures have the nice property that they appeal to theorem-proving only with respect to the initial database state. We also address the problem of proving properties true in all states of the database. It turns out that mathematical induction is required for this task, and we formulate a number of suitable induction axioms. Among those properties of database states that we wish to prove are the standard database notions of static and dynamic integrity constraints. In our setting, these emerge as inductive entailments of the database.
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© 1992 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Reiter, R. (1992). On formalizing database updates: Preliminary report. In: Pirotte, A., Delobel, C., Gottlob, G. (eds) Advances in Database Technology — EDBT '92. EDBT 1992. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 580. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0032420
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0032420
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