View Maintenance for Materialized Transitive-Closure Relations

Abstract

View maintenance for intentional relations is one of the most active research topics in deductive databases. The simplest, but the most frequently found form of the recursive relations in deductive databases is transitive-closure relations. Materialized transitive closure view definitions and maintenance of these views under updates on the base relations, is one of the techniques for the view maintenance of transitive closure relations. In this paper a special data structure is presented that represents transitive closure relation in compressed form. Update operations on this structure are defined and their algorithms are given. Unlike previous proposals, the technique presented in this paper treats cyclic and acyclic relations in the same way without requiring the determination of cycles after the update operations. The materialized form of the transitive closure relation is also suitable for different forms of ransitive closure queries.