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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 1–5Cite as

Datalog

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Synonyms

Deductive databases

Definition

An important limitation of relational calculus/algebra is that it cannot express queries involving “paths” through an instance, such as taking the transitive closure over a binary relation. Datalog extends conjunctive queries with recursion to support such queries. A Datalog program consists of a set of rules, each of which is a conjunctive query. Recursion is introduced by allowing the same relational symbols in both the heads and the bodies of the rules. A surprising and elegant property of Datalog is that there are three very different but equivalent approaches to define its semantics, namely, the model-theoretic, proof-theoretic, and fixpoint approaches. Datalog inherits these properties from logic programming and its standard language Prolog. The main restriction that distinguishes Datalog from Prolog is that function symbols are not allowed.

Several techniques have been proposed for the efficient evaluation of Datalog programs. They are...

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Recommended Reading

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. LogicBlox, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Grigoris Karvounarakis

Authors
  1. Grigoris Karvounarakis
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Grigoris Karvounarakis .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. Department of Computer and Inf. Science, University of Pennsylvania, 200 South 33rd Street, 19104-6389, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Val Tannen

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Karvounarakis, G. (2017). Datalog. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7993-3_968-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7993-3_968-2

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4899-7993-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4899-7993-3

  • eBook Packages: Springer Reference Computer SciencesReference Module Computer Science and Engineering

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