Title
Tractable Orders for Direct Access to Ranked Answers of Conjunctive Queries
Abstract
ABSTRACTWe study the question of when we can provide logarithmic-time direct access to the k-th answer to a Conjunctive Query (CQ) with a specified ordering over the answers, following a preprocessing step that constructs a data structure in time quasilinear in the size of the database. Specifically, we embark on the challenge of identifying the tractable answer orderings that allow for ranked direct access with such complexity guarantees. We begin with lexicographic orderings and give a decidable characterization (under conventional complexity assumptions) of the class of tractable lexicographic orderings for every CQ without self-joins. We then continue to the more general orderings by the sum of attribute weights and show for it that ranked direct access is tractable only in trivial cases. Hence, to better understand the computational challenge at hand, we consider the more modest task of providing access to only a single answer (i.e., finding the answer at a given position) - a task that we refer to as the selection problem. We indeed achieve a quasilinear-time algorithm for a subset of the class of full CQs without self-joins, by adopting a solution of Frederickson and Johnson to the classic problem of selection over sorted matrices. We further prove that none of the other queries in this class admit such an algorithm.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1145/3452021.3458331
International Conference on Management of Data
Keywords
DocType
Citations 
conjunctive queries, direct access, ranking function, answer orderings, query classification
Conference
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.35
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Nofar Carmeli164.84
Tziavelis, Nikolaos212.04
Wolfgang Gatterbauer349834.18
Benny Kimelfeld4103471.63
Mirek Riedewald5113684.31