A Generalized Transitive Closure for Relational Queries

Summary: Introduce a generalized transitive-closure operator for relational algebra based on a maximally general associative composition definable using only relational operators. Enables use of standard transitive-closure algorithms and supports selection without full materialization. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 842
Venue: PODS
Year: 1988
Pagerank: 5.6184826e-05
Overall Rank: 7,438 | 48.97%
DOI: 10.1145/308386.308467

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Seppo Sippu (University of Jyväskylä)
2. Eljas Soisalon-Soininen (University of Helsinki)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{sippu_pods88,
        address = {New York, NY, USA},
        series = {{PODS} '88},
        title = {{A Generalized Transitive Closure for Relational Queries}},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/308386.308467},
        doi = {10.1145/308386.308467},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} Symposium on {Principles} of {Database} {Systems}},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        author = {Sippu, Seppo and Soisalon-Soininen, Eljas},
        year = {1988}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 2 of 2 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
2,957	Graph-Theoretic Methods In Database Theory	1990	PODS	7.9200375e-05
6,840	Hybrid Transitive Closure Algorithms	1990	VLDB	5.7575344e-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
63	An Amateur's Introduction to Recursive Query Processing Strategies	1986	SIGMOD	0.00038782376
217	Traversal Recursion: A Practical Approach to Supporting Recursive Applications	1986	SIGMOD	0.00024458594
344	On the Power of Magic	1987	PODS	0.00020659405
1,086	New Strategies for Computing the Transitive Closure of a Database Relation	1987	VLDB	0.00012252192
1,114	Direct Algorithms for Computing the Transitive Closure of Database Relations	1987	VLDB	0.00012118382
1,259	On the Computation of the Transitive Closure of Relational Operators	1986	VLDB	0.00011437537
2,033	One-Sided Recursions	1987	PODS	9.2819369e-05
2,076	A Study of Transitive Closure As a Recursion Mechanism	1987	SIGMOD	9.212586e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	8,035	On Tree-Based Techniques for Query Evaluation	1992	PODS
2	4,425	EFFICIENT EVALUATION FOR A SUBSET OF RECURSIVE QUERIES (Extended Abstract)	1987	PODS
3	8,775	A Parallel Strategy for Transitive Closure using Double Hash-Based Clustering	1990	VLDB
4	1,114	Direct Algorithms for Computing the Transitive Closure of Database Relations	1987	VLDB
5	1,086	New Strategies for Computing the Transitive Closure of a Database Relation	1987	VLDB
6	2,198	A Recursive Algebra and Query Optimization for Nested Relations	1989	SIGMOD
7	1,330	Efficient Transitive Closure Algorithms	1988	VLDB
8	1,382	Estimating the Size of Generalized Transitive Closures	1989	VLDB
9	1,259	On the Computation of the Transitive Closure of Relational Operators	1986	VLDB
10	2,076	A Study of Transitive Closure As a Recursion Mechanism	1987	SIGMOD