A Trichotomy for Regular Trail Queries

Regular path queries (RPQs) are an essential component of graph query languages. Such queries consider a regular expression r and a directed edge-labeled graph G and search for paths in G for which the sequence of labels is in the language of r. In order to avoid having to consider infinitely many paths, some database engines restrict such paths to be trails, that is, they only consider paths without repeated edges. In this paper we consider the evaluation problem for RPQs under trail semantics, in the case where the expression is fixed. We show that, in this setting, there exists a trichotomy. More precisely, the complexity of RPQ evaluation divides the regular languages into the finite languages, the class T_tract (for which the problem is tractable), and the rest. Interestingly, the tractable class in the trichotomy is larger than for the trichotomy for simple paths, discovered by Bagan et al. [Bagan et al., 2013]. In addition to this trichotomy result, we also study characterizations of the tractable class, its expressivity, the recognition problem, closure properties, and show how the decision problem can be extended to the enumeration problem, which is relevant to practice

MSO Queries on Trees: Enumerating Answers under Updates Using Forest Algebras

We describe a framework for maintaining forest algebra representations that are of logarithmic height for unranked trees. Such a representations can be computed in O(n) time and updated in O(log(n)) time. The framework is of potential interest for data structures and algorithms for trees whose complexity depend on the depth of the tree (representation). We provide an exemplary application of the framework to the problem of efficiently enumerating answers to MSO-definable queries over trees which are subject to local updates. We exhibit an algorithm that uses an O(n) preprocessing phase and enumerates answers with O(log(n)) delay between them. When the tree is updated, the algorithm can avoid repeating expensive preprocessing and restart the enumeration phase within O(log(n)) time. Our algorithms and complexity results in the paper are presented in terms of node-selecting tree automata representing the MSO queries

A Trichotomy for Regular Trail Queries

Regular path queries (RPQs) are an essential component of graph query languages. Such queries consider a regular expression r and a directed edge-labeled graph G and search for paths in G for which the sequence of labels is in the language of r. In order to avoid having to consider infinitely many paths, some database engines restrict such paths to be trails, that is, they only consider paths without repeated edges. In this paper we consider the evaluation problem for RPQs under trail semantics, in the case where the expression is fixed. We show that, in this setting, there exists a trichotomy. More precisely, the complexity of RPQ evaluation divides the regular languages into the finite languages, the class Ttract (for which the problem is tractable), and the rest. Interestingly, the tractable class in the trichotomy is larger than for the trichotomy for simple paths, discovered by Bagan, Bonifati, and Groz [JCSS 2020]. In addition to this trichotomy result, we also study characterizations of the tractable class, its expressivity, the recognition problem, closure properties, and show how the decision problem can be extended to the enumeration problem, which is relevant to practice

Containment of Simple Regular Path Queries

Testing containment of queries is a fundamental reasoning task in knowledge representation. We study here the containment problem for Conjunctive Regular Path Queries (CRPQs), a navigational query language extensively used in ontology and graph database querying. While it is known that containment of CRPQs is expspace-complete in general, we focus here on severely restricted fragments, which are known to be highly relevant in practice according to several recent studies. We obtain a detailed overview of the complexity of the containment problem, depending on the features used in the regular expressions of the queries, with completeness results for np, pitwo, pspace or expspace

A Trichotomy for Regular Trail Queries

Regular path queries (RPQs) are an essential component of graph query languages. Such queries consider a regular expression r and a directed edge-labeled graph G and search for paths in G for which the sequence of labels is in the language of r. In order to avoid having to consider infinitely many paths, some database engines restrict such paths to be trails, that is, they only consider paths without repeated edges. In this paper we consider the evaluation problem for RPQs under trail semantics, in the case where the expression is fixed. We show that, in this setting, there exists a trichotomy. More precisely, the complexity of RPQ evaluation divides the regular languages into the finite languages, the class Ttract (for which the problem is tractable), and the rest. Interestingly, the tractable class in the trichotomy is larger than for the trichotomy for simple paths, discovered by Bagan, Bonifati, and Groz [JCSS 2020]. In addition to this trichotomy result, we also study characterizations of the tractable class, its expressivity, the recognition problem, closure properties, and show how the decision problem can be extended to the enumeration problem, which is relevant to practice