We study complexity of the evaluation of fixpoint boundedvariable queries in relational databases. We exhibit a finite database such that the problem whether a closed fixpoint formula using only 2 individual variables is satisfied in this database is PSPACE-complete. This clarifies the issues raised by Moshe Vardi in [Var95]. We study also the complexity of query evaluation for a number of restrictions of fixpoint logic. In particular we exhibit a sublogic for which the upper bound postulated by Vardi holds.

We show that the problem of computing all contiguous k-ary compositions of a sequence of n values under an associative and commutative operator requires 3 k\Gamma1 k+1 n \Gamma O(k) operations. For the operator max we show in contrast that in the decision tree model the complexity is i 1 + \Theta(1= p k) j n \Gamma O(k). Finally we show that the complexity of the corresponding on-line problem for the operator max is i 2 \Gamma 1 k\Gamma1 j n \Gamma O(k). This work was partially supported by the ESPRIT Long Term Research Program of the EU under contract #20244 (ALCOM-IT). y Supported by the Danish Natural Science Research Council (Grant No. 9400044). z Basic Research in Computer Science, Centre of the Danish National Research Foundation. 1 Introduction Given a sequence of values (x 1 ; x 2 ; : : : ; x n ) from a universe U and an associative binary operator \Phi, we consider the problem of computing all k-ary compositions of contiguous subsequences of length...