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What Makes a Variant of Query Determinacy (Un)Decidable? (Invited Talk)

Author Jerzy Marcinkowski

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Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Theory of computation → Database theory
Keywords
  • database theory
  • query
  • view
  • determinacy

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Abstract

This paper was written as the companion paper of the ICDT 2020 invited tutorial. Query determinacy is a broad topic, with literally hundreds of papers published since late 1980s. This paper is not going to be a "survey" but rather a personal perspective of a person somehow involved in the recent developments in the area.
First I explain how, in the last 30+ years, the question of determinacy was formalized. There are many parameters here: obviously one needs to choose the query language of the available views and the query language of the query itself. But - surprisingly - there is also some choice regarding what the word "to compute" actually means in this context.
Then I concentrate on certain variants of the decision problem of determinacy (for each choice of parameters there is one such problem) and explain how I understand the mechanisms rendering such variants of determinacy decidable or undecidable. This is on a rather informal level. No really new theorems are presented, but I show some improvements of existing theorems and also simplified proofs of some of the earlier results.

Cite As Get BibTex

Jerzy Marcinkowski. What Makes a Variant of Query Determinacy (Un)Decidable? (Invited Talk). In 23rd International Conference on Database Theory (ICDT 2020). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 155, pp. 2:1-2:20, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2020) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ICDT.2020.2

Author Details

Jerzy Marcinkowski
  • Institute of Computer Science, University of Wrocław, Poland

Funding

  • Marcinkowski, Jerzy: Supported by the Polish National Science Centre (NCN) grant 2016/23/B/ST6/01438.

Acknowledgements

The author would not have been in a position to write this invited paper had he not been first blessed with the opportunity to work with extraordinary students: Tomasz Gogacz, Grzegorz Głuch and Piotr Ostropolski-Nalewaja.

References

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