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Title Query Languages for Data Exchange: Beyond Unions of Conjunctive Queries
Authors Marcelo Arenas, Pablo Barceló, Juan Reutter
Publication date 2009
Abstract The class of unions of conjunctive queries ($\ucq$) has been shown to
be particularly well-behaved for data exchange; its certain answers
can be computed in polynomial time (in terms of data
complexity). However, this is not the only class with this property;
the certain answers to any $\udat$ program can also can be computed in
polynomial time. The problem is that both $\ucq$ and $\udat$ do not
allow negated atoms, as adding an unrestricted form of negation to
these languages yields to intractability.
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In this paper, we propose a language called $\dat$ that extends
$\udat$ with a restricted form of negation, and study some of its
fundamental properties. In particular, we show that the certain
answers to a $\dat$ program can be computed in polynomial time (in
terms of data complexity), and that every union of conjunctive queries
with at most one inequality or negated relational atom per disjunct,
can be efficiently rewritten as a $\dat$ program in the context of
data exchange. Furthermore, we show that this is also the case for a
syntactic restriction of the class of unions of conjunctive queries
with at most two inequalities per disjunct. This syntactic
restriction is given by two conditions that are optimal, in the sense
that computing certain answers becomes intractable if one removes any
of them. Finally, we provide a thorough analysis of the combined
complexity of computing certain answers to $\dat$ programs and other
related query languages. In particular, we show that this problem is
$\exptime$-complete for $\dat$, even if one restricts to conjunctive
queries with single inequalities, which is a fragment of $\dat$ by the
result mentioned above. Furthermore, we show that the combined
complexity is $\conexptime$-complete for the case of conjunctive
queries with $k$ inequalities, for every $k \geq 2$.
Pages 73-83
Conference name International Conference on Database Theory
Publisher ACM Press (New York, NY, USA)
Reference URL View reference page