On the Expressive Power of Update Primitives

Summary: Shows replace-by-query cannot be expressed using insert/delete/modify, and modify cannot be expressed by insert+delete; adding if-then-else control flow strictly increases expressive power. Discusses implementation routes (temp vars, MERGE, deltas, object creation/arithmetic) and proves primitive ordering/alternation matters (e.g., insert;modify ≠ modify;insert). (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 1600
Venue: PODS
Year: 2013
Pagerank: 5.093636e-05
Overall Rank: 12,231 | 16.09%
DOI: 10.1145/2463664.2465218

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

No non-self incoming citations found for this paper in this database.

Authors

1. Tom J. Ameloot (Hasselt University; Transnational University of Limburg)
2. Jan Van den Bussche (Hasselt University; Transnational University of Limburg)
3. Emmanuel Waller (University of Paris)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{ameloot_pods13,
        address = {New York, NY, USA},
        series = {{PODS} '13},
        title = {{On the Expressive Power of Update Primitives}},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2463664.2465218},
        doi = {10.1145/2463664.2465218},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} Symposium on {Principles} of {Database} {Systems}},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        author = {Ameloot, Tom J. and Van den Bussche, Jan and Waller, Emmanuel},
        year = {2013}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 0 of 0 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 4 of 4 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
421	The Format Model: A Theory of Database Organization (extended abstract)	1982	PODS	0.00018742219
853	Queries Independent of Updates	1993	VLDB	0.00013587101
2,772	Updating XML	2001	SIGMOD	8.1398108e-05
5,457	Destabilizers and Independence of XML Updates	2010	VLDB	6.2131072e-05

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5	6,722	A Model-Theoretic Approach to Updating Logical Databases (Extended Abstract)	1986	PODS
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7	602	On the Semantics of Updates in Databases	1983	PODS
8	14,217	Structures for Manipulating Proposed Updates In Object-Oriented Databases	1996	SIGMOD
9	702	PROCEDURAL AND DECLARATIVE DATABASE UPDATE LANGUAGES (Extended Abstract)	1988	PODS
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