Abstract
Current commercial database management systems (DBMSs) provide users with query languages where solely Boolean conditions are authorized. Thus, it is impossible to express preferences at the level of elementary conditions (over the acceptable values) and/or benveen the various conditions, and then to obtain discriminated answers. The concept of flexible (or gradual) query aims at compensating for this type of limitation. Indeed, the idea is to allow for the expression of preferences at the level of both atomic conditions and their combination. This type of problem has been studied and gave birth to two approaches. In the first one, some capability for ordering elements which have been selected by a Boolean procedure is proposed, whereas the other one relies on the use of fuzzy set theory. The latter turns out to be sound, general and specially suited to the modeling and manipulation of preferences. The principal features of an SQL-like query language supporting flexible queries, interpreted using fuzzy sets, are presented as well as the outline of a sofhvare architecture for processing such flexible queries.
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