Red Spider Meets a Rainworm: Conjunctive Query Finite Determinacy Is Undecidable.
Summary: Proves that conjunctive-query finite determinacy is undecidable, settling a long-standing open problem by extending the Red Spider technique to the finite-instance setting. Builds a concrete Q0 and Q showing finite (but not unrestricted) determinacy and proves no FO-rewriting exists for Q0. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)
Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time
Authors
- 1. Tomasz Gogacz (University of Wrocław)
- 2. Jerzy Marcinkowski (University of Wrocław)
BibTeX Citation
@inproceedings{gogacz_pods16,
address = {New York, NY, USA},
series = {{PODS} '16},
title = {{Red Spider Meets a Rainworm: Conjunctive Query Finite Determinacy Is Undecidable.}},
url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2902251.2902288},
doi = {10.1145/2902251.2902288},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} Symposium on {Principles} of {Database} {Systems}},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
author = {Gogacz, Tomasz and Marcinkowski, Jerzy},
year = {2016}
}
Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)
Showing 2 of 2 citing papers.
| Rank | Citing Paper | Year | Venue | Pagerank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 7,503 | Disclosure-Compliant Query Answering | 2024 | SIGMOD | 5.6029996e-05 |
| 11,754 | On Monotonic Determinacy and Rewritability For Recursive Queries and Views | 2020 | PODS | 5.093636e-05 |
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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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 134 | Testing Containment of Conjunctive Queries Under Functional and Inclusion Dependencies (Extended Abstract) | 1982 | PODS | 0.00030343737 |
| 539 | Computing Queries from Derived Relations | 1985 | VLDB | 0.00016872223 |
| 2,189 | Physical Data Independence, Constraints, and Optimization with Universal Plans | 1999 | VLDB | 8.9856333e-05 |
| 3,433 | On the Decidability and Finite Controllability of Query Processing in Databases with Incomplete Information | 2006 | PODS | 7.4181806e-05 |
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