8 research outputs found
A Dichotomy on the Complexity of Consistent Query Answering for Atoms with Simple Keys
We study the problem of consistent query answering under primary key
violations. In this setting, the relations in a database violate the key
constraints and we are interested in maximal subsets of the database that
satisfy the constraints, which we call repairs. For a boolean query Q, the
problem CERTAINTY(Q) asks whether every such repair satisfies the query or not;
the problem is known to be always in coNP for conjunctive queries. However,
there are queries for which it can be solved in polynomial time. It has been
conjectured that there exists a dichotomy on the complexity of CERTAINTY(Q) for
conjunctive queries: it is either in PTIME or coNP-complete. In this paper, we
prove that the conjecture is indeed true for the case of conjunctive queries
without self-joins, where each atom has as a key either a single attribute
(simple key) or all attributes of the atom