Analysis of Functional Active Databases

Abstract

Active databases are capable of reacting automatically to state changes without user intervention by supporting event-condition-action (ECA) rules of the form “on event if condition do action”. However, it is recognised that the lack of sufficiently powerful analysis techniques for ECA rules is still an impediment to the wider use of active database technology.In this chapter we discuss how abstract interpretation is a promising analysis technique for ECA rules. A major feature of our approach is its generality: it can be applied to any active DBMS whose rule execution semantics have been specified as a function that takes an initial database and an initial list of rule actions to be execute..