Datalog Unchained

Summary: Reviews Datalog-like languages with procedural forward‑chaining semantics as an operational alternative to declarative Datalog. Argues this unified formalism captures fixpoint, while and all computable queries, naturally supports updates and nondeterminism, and underpins active DBs, production rules and distributed/reactive systems. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 1864
Venue: PODS
Year: 2021
Pagerank: 6.4332239e-05
Overall Rank: 4,943 | 66.09%
DOI: 10.1145/3452021.3458815

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Victor Vianu (INRIA; University of California San Diego)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{vianu_pods21,
        address = {New York, NY, USA},
        series = {{PODS} '21},
        title = {{Datalog Unchained}},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3452021.3458815},
        doi = {10.1145/3452021.3458815},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} Symposium on {Principles} of {Database} {Systems}},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        author = {Vianu, Victor},
        year = {2021}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 6 of 6 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
7,035	Optimizing Recursive Queries with Program Synthesis	2022	SIGMOD	5.7216112e-05
9,522	Exploiting the Power of Equality-generating Dependencies in Ontological Reasoning	2022	VLDB	5.2557598e-05
10,166	Recursive Querying of Neural Networks via Weighted Structures	2026	PODS	5.093636e-05
11,261	Efficient Enumeration of Recursive Plans in Transformation-based Query Optimizers	2024	VLDB	5.093636e-05
11,336	The Vadalog Parallel System: Distributed Reasoning with Datalog+/-	2024	VLDB	5.093636e-05
11,500	SparqLog: A System for Efficient Evaluation of SPARQL 1.1 Queries via Datalog	2023	VLDB	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 32 of 32 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
411	Worst-case Optimal Join Algorithms	2012	PODS	0.00018902089
490	Design and Implementation of the LogicBlox System	2015	SIGMOD	0.000175757
702	PROCEDURAL AND DECLARATIVE DATABASE UPDATE LANGUAGES (Extended Abstract)	1988	PODS	0.00014855299
989	Why Not Negation By Fixpoint?	1988	PODS	0.00012804792
1,131	The Lixto Data Extraction Project - Back and Forth between Theory and Practice	2004	PODS	0.00012044716
1,240	Consistency Analysis in Bloom: a CALM and Collected Approach	2011	CIDR	0.00011536847
1,297	The Alternating Fixpoint of Logic Programs with Negation (Extended Abstract)	1989	PODS	0.0001126031
1,419	Every Logic Program Has a Natural Stratification And an Iterated Least Fixed Point Model	1989	PODS	0.00010830412
1,522	Unfounded Sets and Well-Founded Semantics for General Logic Programs	1988	PODS	0.00010502706
1,623	Relational Transducers for Declarative Networking	2011	PODS	0.0001020106
1,726	A Transaction Language Complete for Database Update and Specification	1987	PODS	9.9156202e-05
2,026	Orchestra: Facilitating Collaborative Data Sharing	2007	SIGMOD	9.287998e-05
2,180	Monadic Datalog and the Expressive Power of Languages for Web Information Extraction	2002	PODS	9.0110009e-05
2,402	Update Semantics for Incomplete Databases	1985	VLDB	8.6276184e-05
2,425	Diagnosis of Asynchronous Discrete Event Systems: Datalog to the Rescue!	2005	PODS	8.6005163e-05
2,564	Visual Web Information Extraction with Lixto	2001	VLDB	8.4118854e-05
2,594	Big Data Analytics with Datalog Queries on Spark	2016	SIGMOD	8.3646367e-05
3,331	Datalog Redux: Experience and Conjecture	2010	PODS	7.5135835e-05
3,712	Non-Deterministic Languages to Express Deterministic Transformations	1990	PODS	7.1777407e-05
4,662	The Relational Model Of Data And Cylindrical Algebras	1982	PODS	6.5787742e-05
4,831	Stable Models and Non-Determinism in Logic Programs with Negation	1990	PODS	6.4877275e-05
4,920	The Vadalog System: Datalog-based Reasoning for Knowledge Graphs	2018	VLDB	6.4449498e-05
4,952	A Rule-based Language for Web Data Management	2011	PODS	6.4303908e-05
5,745	DIADEM: Thousands of Websites to a Single Database	2014	VLDB	6.1018855e-05
7,361	Static Analysis of Active XML Systems	2008	PODS	5.6340455e-05
7,884	Weaker Forms of Monotonicity for Declarative Networking: a More Fine-grained Answer to the CALM-conjecture	2014	PODS	5.5229059e-05
8,817	Function Symbols in Tuple-Generating Dependencies: Expressive Power and Computability	2015	PODS	5.3637297e-05
9,181	Expressive Languages for Querying the Semantic Web	2014	PODS	5.3064263e-05
9,863	The Space-Efficient Core of Vadalog	2019	PODS	5.2045536e-05
9,864	Tractable Database Design through Bounded Treewidth	2006	PODS	5.2045536e-05
9,865	Containment of Conjunctive Object Meta-Queries	2006	VLDB	5.2045536e-05
12,230	Collaborative Data-Driven Workflows: Think Global, Act Local	2013	PODS	5.093636e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	6,802	Sequences, Datalog and Transducers	1995	PODS
2	6,301	Evaluating Datalog over Semirings: A Grounding-based Approach	2024	PODS
3	6,752	Modelling Non Deterministic Queries and Updates In Deductive Databases	1988	VLDB
4	6,001	Generative Datalog with Continuous Distributions	2020	PODS
5	12,976	Static Analysis of Intensional Databases in U-Datalog	1996	PODS
6	2,600	Convergence of Datalog over (Pre-) Semirings	2022	PODS
7	3,590	On Probabilistic Fixpoint and Markov Chain Query Languages	2010	PODS
8	3,712	Non-Deterministic Languages to Express Deterministic Transformations	1990	PODS
9	7,536	Database Updates in Logic Programming	1988	PODS
10	13,078	Datalog Expressiveness of Chain Queries: Grammar Tools and Characterizations	1992	PODS