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A Trichotomy in the Complexity of Counting Answers to Conjunctive Queries

Authors Hubie Chen, Stefan Mengel

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Hubie Chen
Stefan Mengel

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Hubie Chen and Stefan Mengel. A Trichotomy in the Complexity of Counting Answers to Conjunctive Queries. In 18th International Conference on Database Theory (ICDT 2015). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 31, pp. 110-126, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2015) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ICDT.2015.110

Abstract

Conjunctive queries are basic and heavily studied database queries; in relational algebra, they are the select-project-join queries. In this article, we study the fundamental problem of counting, given a conjunctive query and a relational database, the number of answers to the query on the database. In particular, we study the complexity of this problem relative to sets of conjunctive queries. We present a trichotomy theorem, which shows essentially that this problem on a set of conjunctive queries is either tractable, equivalent to the parameterized CLIQUE problem, or as hard as the parameterized counting CLIQUE problem; the criteria describing which of these situations occurs is simply stated, in terms of graph-theoretic conditions.

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Keywords
  • database theory
  • query answering
  • conjunctive queries
  • counting complexity

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