Consistent Query Answering for Primary Keys on Rooted Tree Queries

We study the data complexity of consistent query answering (CQA) on databases that may violate the primary key constraints. A repair is a maximal subset of the database satisfying the primary key constraints. For a Boolean query q, the problem CERTAINTY(q) takes a database as input, and asks whether or not each repair satisfies q. The computational complexity of CERTAINTY(q) has been established whenever q is a self-join-free Boolean conjunctive query, or a (not necessarily self-join-free) Boolean path query. In this paper, we take one more step towards a general classification for all Boolean conjunctive queries by considering the class of rooted tree queries. In particular, we show that for every rooted tree query q, CERTAINTY(q) is in FO, NL-hard $\cap$ LFP, or coNP-complete, and it is decidable (in polynomial time), given q, which of the three cases applies. We also extend our classification to larger classes of queries with simple primary keys. Our classification criteria rely on query homomorphisms and our polynomial-time fixpoint algorithm is based on a novel use of context-free grammar (CFG).Comment: To appear in PODS'2

Counting database repairs under primary keys revisited (DISCUSSION PAPER)

Counting database repairs under primary keys revisited (DISCUSSION PAPER

Counting database repairs under primary keys revisited

Consistent query answering (CQA) aims to deliver meaningful answers when queries are evaluated over inconsistent databases. Such answers must be certainly true in all repairs, which are consistent databases whose difference from the inconsistent one is somehow minimal. An interesting task in this context is to count the number of repairs that entail the query. This problem has been already studied for conjunctive queries and primary keys; we know that it is #P-complete in data complexity under polynomial-time Turing reductions (a.k.a. Cook reductions). However, as it has been already observed in the literature of counting complexity, there are problems that are "hard-to-count-easy-to-decide", which cannot be complete (under reasonable assumptions) for #P under weaker reductions, and, in particular, under standard many-one logspace reductions (a.k.a. parsimonious reductions). For such "hard-to-count-easy-to-decide" problems, a crucial question is whether we can determine their exact complexity by looking for subclasses of #P to which they belong. Ideally, we would like to show that such a problem is complete for a subclass of #P under many-one logspace reductions. The main goal of this work is to perform such a refined analysis for the problem of counting the number of repairs under primary keys that entail the query