Title
Answering Conjunctive Queries under Updates.
Abstract
We consider the task of enumerating and counting answers to k-ary conjunctive queries against relational databases that may be updated by inserting or deleting tuples. We exhibit a new notion of q-hierarchical conjunctive queries and show that these can be maintained efficiently in the following sense. During a linear time pre-processing phase, we can build a data structure that enables constant delay enumeration of the query results; and when the database is updated, we can update the data structure and restart the enumeration phase within constant time. For the special case of self-join free conjunctive queries we obtain a dichotomy: if a query is not q-hierarchical, then query enumeration with sublinear *) delay and sublinear update time (and arbitrary preprocessing time) is impossible. For answering Boolean conjunctive queries and for the more general problem of counting the number of solutions of k-ary queries we obtain complete dichotomies: if the query's homomorphic core is q-hierarchical, then size of the the query result can be computed in linear time and maintained with constant update time. Otherwise, the size of the query result cannot be maintained with sublinear update time. All our lower bounds rely on the OMv-conjecture, a conjecture on the hardness of online matrix-vector multiplication that has recently emerged in the field of fine-grained complexity to characterise the hardness of dynamic problems. The lower bound for the counting problem additionally relies on the orthogonal vectors conjecture, which in turn is implied by the strong exponential time hypothesis.*) By sublinear we mean O(n(1-ε) for some ε > 0, where n is the size of the active domain of the current database.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1145/3034786.3034789
PODS
Keywords
DocType
Volume
query evaluation, constant delay enumeration, counting complexity, dichotomy, dynamic algorithms, online matrix-vector multiplication
Conference
abs/1702.06370
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
13
0.56
30
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Christoph Berkholz1497.03
Jens Keppeler2251.50
Nicole Schweikardt352637.82