2002/12/05 by Jan Chomicki, Chomicki, Jan, Jerzy Marcinkowski +1 · 4 citations
Computer Science · #Advanced Database Systems and Queries #Databases (cs.DB) #Distributed systems and fault tolerance #F.4.1 #FOS: Computer and information sciences #H.2.3 #I.2.3 #Logic, Reasoning, and Knowledge #cs.DB
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.cs/0212004
arxiv created 2002/12/05 · openalex publication_date 2002/12/05 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We address the problem of minimal-change integrity maintenance in the context of integrity constraints in relational databases. We assume that integrity-restoration actions are limited to tuple deletions. We identify two basic computational issues: repair checking (is a database instance a repair of a given database?) and consistent query answers (is a tuple an answer to a given query in every repair of a given database?). We study the computational complexity of both problems, delineating the boundary between the tractable and the intractable. We consider denial constraints, general functional and inclusion dependencies, as well as key and foreign key constraints. Our results shed light on the computational feasibility of minimal-change integrity maintenance. The tractable cases should lead to practical implementations. The intractability results highlight the inherent limitations of any integrity enforcement mechanism, e.g., triggers or referential constraint actions, as a way of performing minimal-change integrity maintenance.