The containment problem of Datalog queries is well known to be undecidable.
There are, however, several Datalog fragments for which containment is known to
be decidable, most notably monadic Datalog and several "regular" query
languages on graphs. Monadically Defined Queries (MQs) have been introduced
recently as a joint generalization of these query languages. In this paper, we
study a wide range of Datalog fragments with decidable query containment and
determine exact complexity results for this problem. We generalize MQs to
(Frontier-)Guarded Queries (GQs), and show that the containment problem is
3ExpTime-complete in either case, even if we allow arbitrary Datalog in the
sub-query. If we focus on graph query languages, i.e., fragments of linear
Datalog, then this complexity is reduced to 2ExpSpace. We also consider nested
queries, which gain further expressivity by using predicates that are defined
by inner queries. We show that nesting leads to an exponentially increasing
hierarchy for the complexity of query containment, both in the linear and in
the general case. Our results settle open problems for (nested) MQs, and they
paint a comprehensive picture of the state of the art in Datalog query
containment.Comment: 20 page