Inductive Pebble Games And The Expressive Power Of Datalog

Summary: Develops inductive pebble games and a DATALOG normal form tied to Alternating Turing Machine computations as a tool to prove inexpressibility. Applies this framework to sketch that the directed simple even-length path query is not expressible in DATALOG. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 874
Venue: PODS
Year: 1989
Pagerank: 8.1537086e-05
Overall Rank: 2,763 | 81.05%
DOI: 10.1145/73721.73751

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. V.S. Lakshmanan (University of Toronto)
2. A.O. Mendelzon (University of Toronto)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{lakshmanan_pods89,
        address = {New York, NY, USA},
        series = {{PODS} '89},
        title = {{INDUCTIVE PEBBLE GAMES AND THE EXPRESSIVE POWER OF DATALOG}},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/73721.73751},
        doi = {10.1145/73721.73751},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} Symposium on {Principles} of {Database} {Systems}},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        author = {Lakshmanan, V.S. and Mendelzon, A.O.},
        year = {1989}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 5 of 5 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
3,800	On the Expressive Power of Datalog: Tools and a Case Study	1990	PODS	7.1130834e-05
6,209	On Datalog vs. Polynomial Time	1991	PODS	5.9425753e-05
6,613	Inherent Complexity of Recursive Queries (Extended Abstract)	1999	PODS	5.8219225e-05
12,986	Combinatorial Games in Database Theory	1995	PODS	5.093636e-05
13,078	Datalog Expressiveness of Chain Queries: Grammar Tools and Characterizations	1992	PODS	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 2 of 2 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
312	A Graphical Query Language Supporting Recursion	1987	SIGMOD	0.00021733819
1,658	Finding Regular Simple Paths in Graph Databases	1989	VLDB	0.00010092304

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