Integrity constraints are very useful in many contexts, such as, for example, deductive databases, abductive and inductive logic programming. However, fully testing the integrity constraints after each update or modification can be very expensive and methods have been developed which simplify the integrity constraints. In this paper, we pursue the goal of writing this simplification procedure as a meta-program in logic programming and then using partial deduction to obtain pre-compiled integrity checks for certain update patterns. We argue that the ground representation has to be used to write this metaprogram declaratively. We however also show that, contrary to what one might expect, current partial deduction techniques are then unable to specialise this meta-interpreter in an interesting way and no pre-compilation of integrity checks can be obtained. In fact, we show that partial deduction (alone) is not able to perform any (sophisticated) specialisation at the object-level for meta...

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In [23] we presented a partial evaluation scheme for a "real life" subset of Prolog, containing first-order built-in's, simple side-effects and the operational predicate if-then-else. In this paper we apply this scheme to specialise integrity checking in deductive databases. We present an interpreter which can be used to check the integrity constraints in hierarchical deductive databases. This interpreter incorporates the knowledge that the integrity constraints were not violated prior to a given update sad uses a technique to lift the ground representation to t,e non-ground one for resolution. By partially evaluating this mots-interpreter for certain transaction patterns we are able to obtain very efficient specialised update procedures, executing substantially faster than the original mots-interpreter. The partial eval- uation scheme presented in [23] seems to be capable of tomatically generating highly specialised update procedures for deductive databases.