Conference Proceedings
Decidability and undecidability results for the termination problem of active database rules
J Bailey, G Dong, K Ramamohanarao
Proceedings of the ACM SIGACT-SIGMOD-SIGART Symposium on Principles of Database Systems | Published : 1998
Abstract
Active database systems enhance the functionality of traditional databases through the use of active rules or `triggers'. One of the principal questions for such systems is that of termination - is it possible for the rules to recursively activate one another indefinitely, given an initial triggering event. In this paper, we study the decidability of the termination problem, our aim being to delimit the boundary between the decidable and the undecidable. We present two families of rule languages, the one literal languages where each update is permitted to have just one atom in its body, and the unary languages where only unary relations may be updated, but higher arity relations may be acces..
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