Constant Time Maintenance or The Triumph of the fd.

Summary: In weak instance theory the paper proves any sublinear-time maintenance algorithm must be constant-time and characterizes constraint classes admitting constant-time maintenance as those axiomatizable by embedded functional dependencies (typed → binary EGDs). Also provides recognition and maintenance algorithms for FDs plus one join dependency and connects the results to prior work on modified foreign-key constraints. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 771
Venue: PODS
Year: 1986
Pagerank: 6.2533477e-05
Overall Rank: 5,351 | 63.29%
DOI: 10.1145/6012.6017

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Marc H. Graham (Georgia Institute of Technology; Sperry Inc.)
2. Ke Wang (Georgia Institute of Technology)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{graham_pods86,
        address = {New York, NY, USA},
        series = {{PODS} '86},
        title = {{Constant Time Maintenance or The Triumph of the fd.}},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/6012.6017},
        doi = {10.1145/6012.6017},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} Symposium on {Principles} of {Database} {Systems}},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        author = {Graham, Marc H. and Wang, Ke},
        year = {1986}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 4 of 4 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
8,297	Independence-reducible Database Schemes	1988	PODS	5.4574671e-05
8,298	A Characterization of Constant-time-maintainability for BCNF Database Schemes	1988	SIGMOD	5.4574671e-05
13,134	Can Constant-time Maintainability Be More Practical?	1989	PODS	5.093636e-05
13,171	On Designing Database Schemes Bounded or Constant-time-maintainable with respect to Functional Dependencies	1987	PODS	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 8 of 8 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
266	Can We Use The Universal Instance Assumption Without Using Nulls?	1981	SIGMOD	0.00022823892
742	Independent Database Schemas (Extended Abstract)	1982	PODS	0.00014426824
1,417	On Computing Restricted Projections of Representative Instances	1985	PODS	0.00010839353
3,551	Efficient Query Answering in the Representative Instance Approach	1985	PODS	7.3196924e-05
4,606	Updating a Relational Database through a Universal Schema Interface	1985	PODS	6.6090168e-05
4,659	On The Complexity And Axiomatizability Of Consistent Database States	1984	PODS	6.5797982e-05
4,843	Notions of Dependency Satisfaction	1982	PODS	6.482729e-05
7,808	A New Characterization of Independence	1983	SIGMOD	5.5403037e-05

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5	3,527	Functional Dependencies on Cyclic Database Schemes	1983	SIGMOD
6	9,845	Towards Update-Dependent Analysis of Query Maintenance	2025	PODS
7	4,659	On The Complexity And Axiomatizability Of Consistent Database States	1984	PODS
8	13,171	On Designing Database Schemes Bounded or Constant-time-maintainable with respect to Functional Dependencies	1987	PODS
9	13,134	Can Constant-time Maintainability Be More Practical?	1989	PODS
10	8,298	A Characterization of Constant-time-maintainability for BCNF Database Schemes	1988	SIGMOD