Suppose one is given a description of a system, together with an observation of the system's behaviour which conflicts with the way the system is meant to behave. The diagnostic problem is to determine those components of the system which, when assumed to be functioning abnormally, will explain the discrepancy between the observed and correct system behaviour. We propose a general theory for this problem. The theory requires only that the system be described in a suitable logic. Moreover, there are many such suitable logics, e.g. first-order, temporal, dynamic, etc. As a result, the theory accommodates diagnostic reasoning in a wide variety of practical settings, including digital and analogue circuits, medicine, and database updates. The theory leads to an algorithm for computing all diagnoses, and to various results concerning principles of measurement for discriminating among competing diagnoses. Finally, the theory reveals close connections between diagnostic reasoning and nonmonotonic reasoning.

The purpose of this paper is to show that logic provides a convenient formalism for studying classical database problems. There are two main parts to the paper, devoted respectively to conventional databases and deductive databases. In the first part, we focus on query languages, integrity modeling and maintenance, query optimization, and data

Various models and languages for describing and manipulating hierarchically structured data have been proposed. Algebraic, calculus-based and logic-programming oriented languages have all been considered. This paper presents a general model for complex objects, and languages for it based on the three paradigms. The algebraic language generalizes those presented in the literature; it is shown to be related to the functional style of programming advocated by Backus. The notion of domain independence familiar from relational databases is defined, and syntactic restrictions (referred to as safety conditions) on calculus queries are formulated, that guarantee domain independence. The main results are: The domain-independent calculus, the safe calculus, the algebra, and the logic-programming oriented language have equivalent expressive power. In particular, recursive queries, such as the transitive closure, can be expressed in each of the languages. For this result, the algebra needs the pow...

Abstract. Various models and languages for describing and manipulating hierar-chically structured data have been proposed. Algebraic, calculus-based, and logic-programming oriented languages have all been considered. This article presents a general model for complex values (i.e., values with hierarchical structures), and languages for it based on the three paradigms. The algebraic language generalizes those presented in the literature; it is shown to be related to the functional style of programming advocated by Backus (1978). The notion of domain independence (from relational databases) is defined, and syntactic restrictions (referred to as safety conditions) on calculus queries are formulated to guarantee domain inde-pendence. The main results are: The domain-independent calculus, the safe cal-culus, the algebra, and the logic-programming oriented language have equivalent expressive power. In particular, recursive queries, such as the transitive closure, can be expressed in each of the languages. For this result, the algebra needs the powerset operation. A more restricted version of safety is presented, such that the restricted safe calculus is equivalent to the algebra without the powerset. The results are extended to the case where arbitrary functions and predicates are used in the languages. Key Words. Database, query language, complex value, complex object, database model.

The set-height of a complex object type is defined to be its level of nesting of the set construct. In a query of the complex object calculus which maps a database D to an output type T,anintermediate type is a type which is used by some variable of the query, but which is not present in D or T.Foreachk, i ≥ 0 we define CALCk,i to be the family of calculus queries mapping from and to types with set-height ≤ k and using intermediate types with set-height ≤ i. In particular, CALC0,0 is the classical relational calculus, and CALC0,1 is equivalent to the family of secondorder (relational) queries. Several results concerning these families of languages are obtained. A primary focus is on the families CALC0,i, which map relations to relations. Upper and lower bounds in terms of hyper-exponential time and space on the complexity of these families are provided. The CALC0,i hierarchy does not collapse with respect to expressive power. The union ∪0≤iCALC0,i is exactly the family of elementary queries, i.e., queries with hyper-exponential complexity. The expressive power of queries from the complex object calculus interpreted using semantics based on the use of arbitrarily large finite or infinite set of invented values is studied. Under these semantics, the expressive power of the relational calculus is not increased, and the CALC0,i hierarchy collapses at CALC0,1. In general, queries with these semantics may not be computable. We also consider an alternative semantics which yields a family of queries equivalent to the computable queries. 1

The expressiveness and complexity of several calculus-based query languages for complex objects is considered. Unlike previous investigations, we are concerned with the complexity of queries on databases of complex objects, rather than flat databases. This raises new issues specific to complex objects. For instance, it is shown that the way the database makes use of its higher-order types has direct impact on query complexity. The use of fixpoint operators is shown to yield languages well-behaved with respect to complexity and expressiveness. In particular, an extension of the fixpoint queries to complex objects is shown to express precisely the PTIME queries, under the assumption that the database makes "full" use of all its types. Similar results involve range-restricted queries. 1 Introduction Complex objects are increasingly part of advanced database systems. They provide the structural core of object-oriented databases. Several query languages for complex objects have been propo...

We propose an object-oriented data model that generalizes the relational, hierarchical, and network models. A database scheme in this model is a directed graph, whose leaves represent data and whose internal nodes represent connections among the data. Instances are constructed from objects, which have separate names and values. We define a logic for the model, and describe a nonprocedural query language that is based on the logic. We also describe an algebraic query language and show that it is equivalent to the logical language. A preliminary version of this paper, under the title "A new approach to database logic", appeared in Proc. 3rd ACM Symp. on Principles of Database Systems, Waterloo, April 1984, pp. 86-96. For a more extensive coverage of the material presented here the reader is referred to the first author's Ph.D. dissertation The logical data model: a new approach to database logic, Dept. of Computer Science, Stanford University, 1985. 1 1. Introduction Research in da...

Deductive databases result from the integration of relational database and logic programming techniques. However, significant problems remain inherent in this simple synthesis from the language point of view. In this paper, we discuss these problems from four different aspects: complex values, object orientation, higherorderness, and updates. In each case, we examine four typical languages that address the corresponding issues.

We investigate the complexity of query processing in the logical data model (LDM). We use two measures: data complexity, which is complexity with respect to the size of the data, and expression complexity, which is complexity with respect to the size of the expressions denoting the queries. Our investigation shows that while the operations of product and union are essentially first-order operations, the power set operation is inherently a higher-order operation and is exponentially expensive. We define a hierarchy of queries based on the depth of nesting of power set operations and show that this hierarchy corresponds to a natural hierarchy of Turing machines that run in multiply exponential time.

We study languages for manipulating partially ordered structures with duplicates (e.g. trees, lists). As a general framework, we consider the pomset (partially ordered multiset) data type. We introduce an algebra for pomsets, which generalizes traditional algebras for (nested) sets, bags and lists. This paper is motivated by the study of the impact of different language primitives on the expressive power. We show that the use of partially ordered types increases the expressive power significantly. Surprisingly, it turns out that the algebra when restricted to both unordered (bags) and totally ordered (lists) intermediate types, yields the same expressive power as fixpoint logic with counting on relational databases. It therefore constitutes a rather robust class of relational queries. On the other hand, we obtain a characterization of PTIME queries on lists by considering only totally ordered types.