Paper: Undecidable Optimization Problems for Database Logic Programs (at LICS 1987)

Authors: Haim Gaifman Harry G. Mairson Yehoshua Sagiv Moshe Y. Vardi

Abstract

Datalog is the language of logic programs without function symbols. It is used as a database query language. If it is possible to eliminate recursion from a Datalog program P, then P is said to be bounded. We show that the problem of deciding whether a given Datalog program is bounded is undecidable, even for linear programs (i.e. programs where each rule contains at most one occurrence of a recursive predicate). We then show that every strongly nontrivial semantic property of Datalog programs that contain boundedness is undecidable.

BibTeX

  @InProceedings{GaifmanMairsonSagiv-UndecidableOptimiza,
    author = 	 {Haim Gaifman and Harry G. Mairson and Yehoshua Sagiv and Moshe Y. Vardi},
    title = 	 {Undecidable Optimization Problems for Database Logic Programs},
    booktitle =  {Proceedings of the Second Annual IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LICS 1987)},
    year =	 {1987},
    month =	 {June}, 
    pages =      {106--115 },
    location =   {Ithaca, NY, USA}, 
    publisher =	 {IEEE Computer Society Press}
  }