Deciding Properties of Transactional Schemas

Summary: Systematic classification of decidability for properties of transactional schemas, showing most natural correctness/consistency properties are undecidable. Identify syntactic restrictions on transactions and property classes that restore decidability and reveal surprising boundaries. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 761
Venue: PODS
Year: 1986
Pagerank: 5.5811446e-05
Overall Rank: 7,615 | 47.76%
DOI: 10.1145/6012.15417

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Serge Abiteboul (INRIA)
2. Victor Vianu (University of California San Diego)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{abiteboul_pods86,
        address = {New York, NY, USA},
        series = {{PODS} '86},
        title = {{Deciding Properties of Transactional Schemas}},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/6012.15417},
        doi = {10.1145/6012.15417},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} Symposium on {Principles} of {Database} {Systems}},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        author = {Abiteboul, Serge and Vianu, Victor},
        year = {1986}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 3 of 3 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,726	A Transaction Language Complete for Database Update and Specification	1987	PODS	9.9156202e-05
2,653	Foundations of Data-Aware Process Analysis: A Database Theory Perspective	2013	PODS	8.2898925e-05
5,632	Extending the Relational Algebra to Support Transaction Time	1987	SIGMOD	6.1421602e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 3 of 3 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
139	A Language Facility for Designing Interactive Database-Intensive Applications	1978	SIGMOD	0.00029742792
906	A Temporal Framework for Database Specifications	1982	VLDB	0.00013310115
4,962	Transactions And Integrity Constraints	1985	PODS	6.4273819e-05

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7	5,190	Stepwise Specification of Dynamic Database Behaviour	1986	SIGMOD
8	14,419	Synthesizing Database Transactions	1990	VLDB
9	7,452	A Transaction Logic for Database Specification	1988	SIGMOD
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