All-Instances Restricted Chase Termination

Abstract

The chase procedure is a fundamental algorithmic tool in database theory with a variety of applications. A key problem concerning the chase procedure is all-instances termination: for a given set of tuple-generating dependencies (TGDs), is it the case that the chase terminates for every input database? In view of the fact that this problem is undecidable, it is natural to ask whether known well-behaved classes of TGDs ensure decidability. We consider here the main paradigms that led to robust TGD-based formalisms, that is, guardedness and stickiness. Although all-instances termination is well-understood for the oblivious chase, the more subtle case of the restricted (a.k.a. the standard) chase is rather unexplored. We show that all-instances restricted chase termination for guarded/sticky single-head TGDs is decidable in elementary time.