Creating specialised integrity checks through partial evaluation of meta-interpreters

Integrity constraints are useful for the specification of deductive databases, as well as for inductive and abductive logic programs. Verifying integrity constraints upon updates is a major efficiency bottleneck and specialised methods have been developed to speedup this task. They can, however, still incur a considerable overhead. In this paper we propose a solution to this problem by using partial evaluation to pre-compile the integrity checking for certain update patterns. The idea being, that a lot of the integrity checking can already be performed given an update pattern without knowing the actual, concrete update. In order to achieve the pre-compilation, we write the specialised integrity checking as a meta-interpreter in logic programming. This meta-interpreter incorporates the knowledge that the integrity constraints were not violated prior to a given update. By partially evaluating this meta-interpreter for certain transaction patterns, using a partial evaluation technique presented in earlier work, we are able to automatically obtain very efficient specialised update procedures, executing faster than other integrity checking procedures proposed in the literature. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.status: publishe