Relational Expressive Power of Constraint Query Languages
Summary: Shows recursive queries (parity, transitive closure) are inexpressible in relational calculus with polynomial inequalities over R. Establishes collapse: generic Boolean queries with many constraint classes collapse to the constraint-free relational calculus under both active-domain and natural semantics, using Ramsey-type combinatorics and nonstandard/model-theoretic methods. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)
Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time
Authors
- 1. Michael Benedikt (AT&T)
- 2. Guozhu Dong (University of Melbourne)
- 3. Leonid Libkin (AT&T)
- 4. Limsoon Wong (Institute of Systems Science)
BibTeX Citation
@inproceedings{benedikt_pods96,
address = {New York, NY, USA},
series = {{PODS} '96},
title = {{Relational Expressive Power of Constraint Query Languages}},
url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/237661.237667},
doi = {10.1145/237661.237667},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} Symposium on {Principles} of {Database} {Systems}},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
author = {Benedikt, Michael and Dong, Guozhu and Libkin, Leonid and Wong, Limsoon},
year = {1996}
}
Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)
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Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)
Showing 5 of 5 cited papers.
Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.
| Rank | Cited Paper | Year | Venue | Pagerank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 889 | Constraint Programming and Database Languages: A Tutorial | 1995 | PODS | 0.00013398105 |
| 1,473 | Towards a Theory of Spatial Database Queries (Extended Abstract) | 1994 | PODS | 0.0001066845 |
| 2,130 | Normal Forms and Conservative Properties for Query Languages over Collection Types | 1993 | PODS | 9.1244275e-05 |
| 2,241 | Finitely Representable Databases | 1994 | PODS | 8.8845324e-05 |
| 4,013 | Linear vs. Order Constraint Queries Over Rational Databases (Extended Abstract) | 1996 | PODS | 6.9565842e-05 |
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