Abstract

Answering queries is computationally very expensive, and many approaches have been proposed in the literature to face this fundamental problem. Some of them are based on optimization modules that exploit quantitative information on the database instance, while other approaches exploit structural properties of the query hypergraph. For instance, acyclic queries can be answered in polynomial time, and also query containment is efficiently decidable for acyclic queries. In this report, we review both quantitative and structural methods for optimizing query answering and identifying tractable classes of queries. Moreover, we provide a formal comparison of structural methods.

Citations