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The Free Termination Property of Queries over Time

Authors Conor Power , Paraschos Koutris , Joseph M. Hellerstein

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Author Details

Conor Power
  • University of California Berkeley, CA, USA
Paraschos Koutris
  • University of Wisconsin Madison, WI, USA
Joseph M. Hellerstein
  • University of California Berkeley, CA, USA

Funding

This work is supported in part by gifts from Accenture, AMD, Anyscale, Cisco, Google, IBM, Intel, Intesa Sanpaolo, Lambda, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Samsung SDS, SAP, and VMware.

Acknowledgements

We thank Val Tannen and Dan Suciu for their insightful feedback on this work. This work was made possible by the Simons Institute 2023 session on Logic and Algorithms in Database Theory and AI.

Cite As Get BibTex

Conor Power, Paraschos Koutris, and Joseph M. Hellerstein. The Free Termination Property of Queries over Time. In 28th International Conference on Database Theory (ICDT 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 328, pp. 32:1-32:22, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ICDT.2025.32

Abstract

Building on prior work on distributed databases and the CALM Theorem, we define and study the question of free termination: in the absence of distributed coordination, what query properties allow nodes in a distributed (database) system to unilaterally terminate execution even though they may receive additional data or messages in the future? This completeness question is complementary to the soundness questions studied in the CALM literature. We also develop a new model based on semiautomata that allows us to bridge from the relational transducer model of the CALM papers to algebraic models that are popular among software engineers (e.g. CRDTs) and of increasing interest to database theory for datalog extensions and incremental view maintenance.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Theory of computation → Distributed computing models
  • Information systems → Parallel and distributed DBMSs
  • Information systems → Stream management
  • Theory of computation → Database theory
Keywords
  • distributed systems
  • algebraic data models
  • coordination-free systems

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