On the Abductive or Deductive Nature of Database Schema Validation and Update Processing Problems

TL;DR

This paper classifies database schema validation and update processing problems as either abductive or deductive reasoning tasks, providing a unified approach using event rules and existing reasoning procedures.

Contribution

It introduces a unified framework to handle various database problems by classifying them as abductive or deductive, leveraging event rules and existing reasoning methods.

Findings

Methods can address all considered database problems

Event rules effectively model state changes

Existing reasoning procedures are applicable

Abstract

We show that database schema validation and update processing problems such as view updating, materialized view maintenance, integrity constraint checking, integrity constraint maintenance or condition monitoring can be classified as problems of either abductive or deductive nature, according to the reasoning paradigm that inherently suites them. This is done by performing abductive and deductive reasoning on the event rules [Oli91], a set of rules that define the difference between consecutive database states In this way, we show that it is possible to provide methods able to deal with all these problems as a whole. We also show how some existing general deductive and abductive procedures may be used to reason on the event rules. In this way, we show that these procedures can deal with all database schema validation and update processing problems considered in this paper.