A New Basis for the Weak Instance Model

Summary: New weak-instance model treats nulls as mere lack of information (not existent-but-unknown), enabling logical theories without universal quantifiers while preserving dependency and query-answering properties. Drops the universal-instance assumption and gives principled semantics for universal-relation interfaces rather than heuristic rewrites. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 779
Venue: PODS
Year: 1987
Pagerank: 5.093636e-05
Overall Rank: 13,173 | 9.63%
DOI: 10.1145/28659.28667

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

No non-self incoming citations found for this paper in this database.

Authors

1. Paolo Atzeni (National Research Council of Italy)
2. Maria Cristina De Bernardis (Sapienza University)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{atzeni_pods87,
        address = {New York, NY, USA},
        series = {{PODS} '87},
        title = {{A New Basis for the Weak Instance Model}},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/28659.28667},
        doi = {10.1145/28659.28667},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} Symposium on {Principles} of {Database} {Systems}},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        author = {Atzeni, Paolo and De Bernardis, Maria Cristina},
        year = {1987}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 3 of 3 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
13,121	Efficient Updates to Independent Schemes in the Weak Instance Model	1990	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
13,132	Updating Databases in the Weak Instance Model	1989	PODS	5.093636e-05
13,184	Independent Database Schemes Under Functional and Inclusion Dependencies	1987	VLDB	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 7 of 7 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
40	Testing Implications Of Data Dependencies	1979	SIGMOD	0.00046918506
266	Can We Use The Universal Instance Assumption Without Using Nulls?	1981	SIGMOD	0.00022823892
613	Database Relations with Null Values (Extended Abstract)	1982	PODS	0.00015723523
742	Independent Database Schemas (Extended Abstract)	1982	PODS	0.00014426824
1,216	Partition Semantics for Relations	1985	PODS	0.00011633715
1,417	On Computing Restricted Projections of Representative Instances	1985	PODS	0.00010839353
7,132	Optimal Computation of Total Projections with Unions of Simple Chase Join Expressions	1984	SIGMOD	5.694968e-05

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