Behavior of Database Production Rules: Termination, Confluence, and Observable Determinism

Summary: Static analysis of termination, confluence, and observable determinism for arbitrary database production rules; isolates problematic rules and yields criteria to guarantee each property. Enables an interactive IDE for rule programmers in Starburst. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 2630
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 1992
Pagerank: 7.088463e-05
Overall Rank: 3,829 | 73.74%
DOI: 10.1145/130283.130296

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Alexander Aiken (IBM)
2. Jennifer Widom (IBM)
3. Joseph M. Hellerstein (IBM; University of California Berkeley)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{aiken_sigmod92,
        title = {{Behavior of Database Production Rules: Termination, Confluence, and Observable Determinism}},
        author = {Aiken, Alexander and Widom, Jennifer and Hellerstein, Joseph M.},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '92},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/130283.130296},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/130283.130296},
        year = {1992}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 11 of 11 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
867	Coordination Avoidance in Database Systems	2015	VLDB	0.00013511197
2,334	Managing Semantic Heterogeneity with Production Rules and Persistent Queues	1993	VLDB	8.7336402e-05
2,653	Foundations of Data-Aware Process Analysis: A Database Theory Perspective	2013	PODS	8.2898925e-05
4,942	Active Complex Event Processing over Event Streams	2011	VLDB	6.4333059e-05
5,074	An Algebraic Approach to Rule Analysis in Expert Database Systems	1994	VLDB	6.3746118e-05
5,270	Semantics and Expressiveness Issues in Active Databases	1995	PODS	6.2908453e-05
5,896	NAOS: Efficient and modular reactive capabilities in an Object-Oriented Database System	1994	VLDB	6.0486927e-05
8,128	Decidability and Undecidability Results for the Termination Problem of Active Database Rules	1998	PODS	5.4825743e-05
9,841	Semantic Integrity Constraints: Declarative Guardrails for AI-Augmented Data Processing Systems	2025	VLDB	5.2101877e-05
12,912	Unrolling Cycle to Decide Trigger Termination	1999	VLDB	5.093636e-05
13,015	Database De-Centralization - A Practical Approach	1995	VLDB	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 6 of 6 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
146	On Rules, Procedures, Caching And Views In Data Base Systems	1990	SIGMOD	0.00029540467
197	The Architecture Of An Active Data Base Management System*	1989	SIGMOD	0.00025700767
716	Set-Oriented Production Rules in Relational Database Systems	1990	SIGMOD	0.00014652696
1,329	Deriving Production Rules for Constraint Maintenance	1990	VLDB	0.00011140837
1,590	Implementing Set-Oriented Production Rules as an Extension to Starburst	1991	VLDB	0.00010257581
3,561	Ode as an Active Database: Constraints and Triggers	1991	VLDB	7.3091114e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	110	Extensible/Rule Based Query Rewrite Optimization in Starburst	1992	SIGMOD
2	7,051	Active Database Systems	1991	VLDB
3	6,196	On Verification Of Database Temporal Constraints	1985	SIGMOD
4	1,329	Deriving Production Rules for Constraint Maintenance	1990	VLDB
5	6,455	Managing Conflicts between Rules	1996	PODS
6	8,128	Decidability and Undecidability Results for the Termination Problem of Active Database Rules	1998	PODS
7	9,906	Relational Database Behavior: Utilizing Relational Discrete Event Systems and Models	1989	PODS
8	716	Set-Oriented Production Rules in Relational Database Systems	1990	SIGMOD
9	5,074	An Algebraic Approach to Rule Analysis in Expert Database Systems	1994	VLDB
10	1,590	Implementing Set-Oriented Production Rules as an Extension to Starburst	1991	VLDB