Towards an efficient evaluation of recursive aggregates in deductive databases

Abstract

This paper is devoted to the evaluation of aggregates (avg, sum,…) in deductive databases. Aggregates have proved to be a necessary modeling tool for a wide range of applications in non-deductive relational databases. They also appear to be important in connection with recursive rules, as shown by thebill of materials example. Several recent papers have studied the problem of semantics for aggregate programs. As in these papers, we distinguish between the classes of stratified (non-recursive) and recursive aggregate programs. For each of these two classes, the declarative semantics is recalled and an efficient evaluation algorithm is presented. The semantics and computation of aggregate programs in the recursive case are more complex: we rely on the notion of graph traversal to motivate the semantics and the evaluation method proposed. The algorithms presented here are integrated in the QSQ framework. Our work extends the recent work on aggregates by proposing an efficient algorithm in the recursive case. Recursive aggregates have been implemented in the EKS-V1 system.