Translating View Updates Using Inversion of Relational Algebra

Views over databases have been studied in various directions for many years. Among these directions, translating view updates in terms of updates on the base relations [BS81, IL83], and materialized views and their maintenance [BLT86, CW91] have motivated many research efforts. Nowadays, materialized views are finding increased research activity with applications in decision support which is relevant for data warehousing. In this paper, we study the translation process in the relational model. We propose a method for characterizing translations of view updates, based on the notion of inverse of a relational expression. Moreover, we characterize two kinds of updates: (1) deterministic updates regardless to the database state, and (2) deterministic updates according to some database state, and finally, we give an overview of performing view updates using the criterion of updates determinism. Keywords: relational views, view update translations, inverses, inverse-images, strongly determin..