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Queries with External Predicates

Authors Paolo Guagliardo , Leonid Libkin , Victor Marsault , Wim Martens , Filip Murlak , Liat Peterfreund , Cristina Sirangelo

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Author Details

Paolo Guagliardo
  • University of Edinburgh, UK
Leonid Libkin
  • RelationalAI and IRIF, CNRS, Paris, France
  • University of Edinburgh, UK
Victor Marsault
  • LIGM, Université Gustave Eiffel, CNRS, France
Wim Martens
  • University of Bayreuth, Germany
  • RelationalAI, Berkeley, CA, USA
Filip Murlak
  • University of Warsaw, Poland
Liat Peterfreund
  • The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
Cristina Sirangelo
  • Université Paris Cité, CNRS, IRIF, F-75013, Paris, France

Funding

We are grateful to RelationalAI for funding this work.
  • Libkin, Leonid: ANR Project VeriGraph, ANR-21-CE48-0015.
  • Murlak, Filip: Poland’s National Science Centre grant 2018/30/E/ST6/00042.
  • Peterfreund, Liat: Israel Science Foundation 2355/24.

Cite As Get BibTex

Paolo Guagliardo, Leonid Libkin, Victor Marsault, Wim Martens, Filip Murlak, Liat Peterfreund, and Cristina Sirangelo. Queries with External Predicates. In 28th International Conference on Database Theory (ICDT 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 328, pp. 22:1-22:20, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ICDT.2025.22

Abstract

Real-life query languages feature external predicates such as user-defined functions or built-in arithmetic and string operations. These predicates are often infinite, potentially leading to unsafe or non-computable queries. To overcome this, traditional languages such as SQL, put significant syntactic restrictions on the use of external predicates. These restrictions have been relaxed in a number of modern query languages, each doing it in their own way. Our goal therefore is to provide a theoretical basis for querying with external predicates. To this end, we formalize queries with external predicates based on the notion of access patterns. We develop a suitable evaluation model, based on Turing machines with oracles, and tailor the classical notion of query safety to it. Since query safety is undecidable in general, we can only produce sufficient conditions for guaranteeing safety. We do so by developing an inference system to derive safety and computability for relational algebra, first-order logic, as well as for a language that combines them both.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Theory of computation → Database theory
Keywords
  • External predicates
  • Query safety
  • Computational model
  • Oracles
  • Infinite predicates
  • Access patterns
  • Relational algebra
  • First-order logic

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