A Measured Evolution of Database Integrity

[EN] Inconsistency in large database systems is commonplace and therefore must be controlled in order to not get out of hand. Consistency in database systems is encoded by integrity constraints. Inconsistency thus corresponds to constraint violations. Database system services need to function in spite of extant integrity violations, but inconsistency should not increase beyond control in the course of the evolution of such systems. Evolution is effected by updates that may involve insertions and deletions of relational facts as well as schema updates. We show how to determine the causes of violations. Knowledge about such causes can be used to control inconsistency: an increase of integrity violations by updates can be prevented, while tolerating extant inconsistencies, even if the database schema is altered, and even if the schema is unsatisfiable.Supported by ERDF/FEDER and the Spanish MEC grant TIN2012-37719-C03-01.Decker, H. (2013). A Measured Evolution of Database Integrity. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. 8216:78-91. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41366-7_778918216Abiteboul, S., Hull, R., Vianu, V.: Foundations of Databases. Addison-Wesley (1995)Arenas, M., Bertossi, L.E., Chomicki, J.: Consistent query answers in inconsistent databases. In: Proceedings of PODS, pp. 68–79. ACM Press (1999)Bertossi, L., Hunter, A., Schaub, T. (eds.): Inconsistency Tolerance. LNCS, vol. 3300. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)Clark, K.: Negation as failure. In: Gallaire, H., Minker, J. (eds.) Logic and Data Bases, pp. 293–322. Plenum Press (1978)Curino, C., Moon, H., Deutsch, A., Zaniolo, C.: Update rewriting and integrity constraint maintenance in a schema evolution support system: Prism++. PVLDB 4, 117–128 (2010)Decker, H.: Towards a dynamic inconsistency-tolerant schema maintenance. In: Song, I.-Y., et al. (eds.) ER Workshops 2008. LNCS, vol. 5232, pp. 89–98. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)Decker, H.: Basic causes for the inconsistency tolerance of query answering and integrity checking. In: Proc. 21st DEXA Workshops, pp. 318–322. IEEE CSP (2010)Decker, H.: Toward a uniform cause-based approach to inconsistency-tolerant database semantics. In: Meersman, R., Dillon, T., Herrero, P. (eds.) OTM 2010. LNCS, vol. 6427, pp. 983–998. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)Decker, H.: Answers that have integrity. In: Schewe, K.-D. (ed.) SDKB 2010. LNCS, vol. 6834, pp. 54–72. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)Decker, H.: Causes for inconsistency-tolerant schema update management. In: Proc. 27th ICDE Workshops, pp. 157–161. IEEE CSP (2011)Decker, H.: Consistent explanations of answers to queries in inconsistent knowledge bases. In: Roth-Berghofer, T., Tintarev, N., Leake, D. (eds.) Proc. IJCAI 2011 Workshop ExaCt, pp. 71–80 (2011)Decker, H.: Partial repairs that tolerate inconsistency. In: Eder, J., Bielikova, M., Tjoa, A.M. (eds.) ADBIS 2011. LNCS, vol. 6909, pp. 389–400. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)Decker, H.: Measure-based inconsistency-tolerant maintenance of database integrity. In: Schewe, K.-D., Thalheim, B. (eds.) SDKB 2013. LNCS, vol. 7693, pp. 149–173. Springer, Heidelberg (2013)Decker, H., de Marín, R.J.: Enabling business rules for concurrent transactions. In: Proc. Int. Conf. on P2P, Parallel, Grid, Cloud and Internet Computing, pp. 207–212. IEEE CPS (2001)Decker, H., Martinenghi, D.: Classifying integrity checking methods with regard to inconsistency tolerance. In: Proceedings of the 10th International ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Principles and Practice of Declarative Programming, pp. 195–204. ACM Press (2008)Decker, H., Martinenghi, D.: Inconsistency-tolerant integrity checking. IEEE Transactions of Knowledge and Data Engineering 23(2), 218–234 (2011)Gupta, A., Sagiv, Y., Ullman, J.D., Widom, J.: Constraint checking with partial information. In: Proceedings of PODS 1994, pp. 45–55. ACM Press (1994)Meliou, A., Gatterbauer, W., Moore, K., Suciu, D.: The complexity of causality and responsibility for query answers and non-answers. In: Proc. 37th VLDB, pp. 34–45 (2011)Türker, C.: Schema evolution in SQL-99 and commercial (object-)relational DBMS. In: Balsters, H., De Brock, B., Conrad, S. (eds.) FoMLaDO 2000 and DEMM 2000. LNCS, vol. 2065, pp. 1–32. Springer, Heidelberg (2001