The Complexity of Why-Provenance for Datalog Queries
Summary: Data- and complexity-theoretic analysis of why-provenance for Datalog queries, filling a literature gap with a sharp dichotomy. Recursive (even linear) Datalog why-provenance is intractable; non-recursive cases are highly tractable. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)
Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time
Authors
- 1. Marco Calautti (University of Milan)
- 2. Ester Livshits (University of Edinburgh)
- 3. Andreas Pieris (University of Cyprus; University of Edinburgh)
- 4. Markus Schneider (University of Edinburgh)
BibTeX Citation
@inproceedings{calautti_pods24,
address = {New York, NY, USA},
series = {{PODS} '24},
title = {{The Complexity of Why-Provenance for Datalog Queries}},
url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3651146},
doi = {10.1145/3651146},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} Symposium on {Principles} of {Database} {Systems}},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
author = {Calautti, Marco and Livshits, Ester and Pieris, Andreas and Schneider, Markus},
year = {2024}
}Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)
Showing 3 of 3 citing papers.
| Rank | Citing Paper | Year | Venue | Pagerank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 9,959 | Datalog with First-Class Facts | 2025 | VLDB | 5.1879626e-05 |
| 10,640 | Circuits and Formulas for Datalog over Semirings | 2025 | PODS | 5.093636e-05 |
| 11,142 | Below and Above Why-Provenance for Datalog Queries | 2024 | 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 17 | Provenance Semirings | 2007 | PODS | 0.00059843817 |
| 763 | On the Complexity of Bounded-Variable Queries | 1995 | PODS | 0.00014230134 |
| 2,503 | The Semiring Framework for Database Provenance | 2017 | PODS | 8.4964654e-05 |
| 2,600 | Convergence of Datalog over (Pre-) Semirings | 2022 | PODS | 8.3571843e-05 |
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