From Datalog Rules to Efficient Programs with Time and Space Guarantees

This paper describes a method for transforming any given set of Datalog rules into an e#cient specialized implementation with guaranteed worst-case time and space complexities, and for computing the complexities from the rules. The running time is optimal in the sense that only useful combinations of facts that lead to all hypotheses of a rule being simultaneously true are considered, and each such combination is considered exactly once. The associated space usage is optimal in that it is the minimum space needed for such consideration modulo scheduling optimizations that may eliminate some summands in the space usage formula. The transformation is based on a general method for algorithm design that exploits fixed-point computation, incremental maintenance of invariants, and combinations of indexed and linked data structures. We apply the method to a number of analysis problems, some with improved algorithm complexities and all with greatly improved algorithm understanding and greatly simplified complexity analysis