A well-established and fundamental insight in database theory is that
negation (also known as complementation) tends to make queries difficult to
process and difficult to reason about. Many basic problems are decidable and
admit practical algorithms in the case of unions of conjunctive queries, but
become difficult or even undecidable when queries are allowed to contain
negation. Inspired by recent results in finite model theory, we consider a
restricted form of negation, guarded negation. We introduce a fragment of SQL,
called GN-SQL, as well as a fragment of Datalog with stratified negation,
called GN-Datalog, that allow only guarded negation, and we show that these
query languages are computationally well behaved, in terms of testing query
containment, query evaluation, open-world query answering, and boundedness.
GN-SQL and GN-Datalog subsume a number of well known query languages and
constraint languages, such as unions of conjunctive queries, monadic Datalog,
and frontier-guarded tgds. In addition, an analysis of standard benchmark
workloads shows that most usage of negation in SQL in practice is guarded
negation