The Complexity of Evaluating Relational Queries
Summary: Exact complexity for projection+natural-join queries: result-equality is DP-complete; containment/equivalence (w.r.t. a fixed relation or fixed query) is Pi_2^p-complete. Also shows cardinality estimation is hard and intermediate joins can blow up exponentially, so joins are combinatorially hard beyond known polynomial cases. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)
Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time
Authors
- 1. Stavros S. Cosmadakis (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
BibTeX Citation
@inproceedings{cosmadakis_pods83,
address = {New York, NY, USA},
series = {{PODS} '83},
title = {{The Complexity of Evaluating Relational Queries}},
url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/588058.588077},
doi = {10.1145/588058.588077},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} Symposium on {Principles} of {Database} {Systems}},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
author = {Cosmadakis, Stavros S.},
year = {1983}
}Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)
Showing 6 of 6 citing papers.
| Rank | Citing Paper | Year | Venue | Pagerank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 377 | Data Exchange: Getting to the Core | 2003 | PODS | 0.00019643793 |
| 763 | On the Complexity of Bounded-Variable Queries | 1995 | PODS | 0.00014230134 |
| 947 | On the Representation and Querying of Sets of Possible Worlds | 1987 | SIGMOD | 0.00013041389 |
| 2,110 | Theory of Database Queries (Extended Abstract) | 1988 | PODS | 9.1532803e-05 |
| 3,801 | On the Complexity of the Containment Problem for Conjunctive Queries with Built-in Predicates | 1998 | PODS | 7.1130194e-05 |
| 6,501 | Representing and Querying XML with Incomplete Information | 2001 | PODS | 5.8604724e-05 |
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Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)
Showing 0 of 0 cited papers.
Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.
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|---|
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