Deciding Containment for Queries with Complex Objects (Extended Abstract)

Summary: Decidable containment and weak-equivalence for a conjunctive query language over complex objects via translation to novel 'simulation' and 'strong simulation' conditions on CQs (conditions involve arbitrary quantifier alternations). Shows simulation/strong-simulation checking is NP-complete, yields NP-completeness of CQ equivalence with grouping/aggregates, and identifies that weak-equivalence collapses to full equivalence when answers cannot contain empty sets. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 1098
Venue: PODS
Year: 1997
Pagerank: 9.7849758e-05
Overall Rank: 1,777 | 87.81%
DOI: 10.1145/263661.263665

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Alon Y. Levy (AT&T)
2. Dan Suciu (AT&T)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{levy_pods97,
        address = {New York, NY, USA},
        series = {{PODS} '97},
        title = {{Deciding Containment for Queries with Complex Objects (Extended Abstract)}},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/263661.263665},
        doi = {10.1145/263661.263665},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} Symposium on {Principles} of {Database} {Systems}},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        author = {Levy, Alon Y. and Suciu, Dan},
        year = {1997}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 13 of 13 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
22	Data Integration: A Theoretical Perspective	2002	PODS	0.00056204792
225	Complexity of Answering Queries Using Materialized Views	1998	PODS	0.00024101949
1,630	On the Decidability of Query Containment under Constraints	1998	PODS	0.00010180625
2,114	Query Rewriting for Semistructured Data	1999	SIGMOD	9.1481121e-05
2,817	On the minimization of XPath queries	2003	VLDB	8.0945626e-05
4,369	Semantic Query Optimization in the Presence of Types	2010	PODS	6.7390374e-05
5,936	Rewriting Nested XML Queries Using Nested Views	2006	SIGMOD	6.0353909e-05
6,193	Incremental View Maintenance For Collection Programming	2016	PODS	5.9471978e-05
6,310	Type Inference for Datalog and its Application to Query Optimisation	2008	PODS	5.9176726e-05
7,654	Positive Higher-Order Queries	2010	PODS	5.5746273e-05
8,971	Equivalence of Nested Queries with Mixed Semantics	2009	PODS	5.3420194e-05
9,865	Containment of Conjunctive Object Meta-Queries	2006	VLDB	5.2045536e-05
12,799	The NEXT Framework for Logical XQuery Optimization	2004	VLDB	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 14 of 14 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
69	Answering Queries Using Views (Extended Abstract)	1995	PODS	0.00038090878
71	Including Group-By in Query Optimization	1994	VLDB	0.00038021159
95	Of Nests and Trees: A Unified Approach to Processing Queries That Contain Nested Subqueries, Aggregates, and Quantifiers	1987	VLDB	0.00034607909
124	A Query Language and Optimization Techniques for Unstructured Data	1996	SIGMOD	0.00030950263
309	Optimization of Real Conjunctive Queries	1993	PODS	0.00021768596
313	OPTIMIZING DATALOG PROGRAMS (Extended Abstract)	1987	PODS	0.0002168869
633	The Complexity of Querying Indefinite Data about Linearly Ordered Domains (Preliminary Version)	1992	PODS	0.00015560958
853	Queries Independent of Updates	1993	VLDB	0.00013587101
953	On the Equivalence of Recursive and Nonrecursive Datalog Programs	1992	PODS	0.00012997935
1,124	Query Optimization by Predicate Move-Around	1994	VLDB	0.00012087356
1,489	Constraint Checking with Partial Information	1994	PODS	0.00010612225
2,130	Normal Forms and Conservative Properties for Query Languages over Collection Types	1993	PODS	9.1244275e-05
2,296	Containment and Minimization of Positive Conjunctive Queries in OODB's (Extended Abstract)	1992	PODS	8.7908999e-05
4,522	Semantic Representations and Query Languages for Or-sets	1993	PODS	6.6466406e-05

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