On the Expressive Power of Datalog: Tools and a Case Study
Summary: Characterizes Datalog(!=) as a fragment of infinitary logic L^infty via pebble games, giving tools for expressiveness analysis. Applies them to classify fixed directed subgraph homeomorphism queries and proves Fortune et al.'s dichotomies proper for Datalog(!=) expressibility without complexity assumptions. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)
Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time
Authors
- 1. Phokion G. Kolaitis (University of California Santa Cruz)
- 2. Moshe Y. Vardi (IBM)
BibTeX Citation
@inproceedings{kolaitis_pods90,
address = {New York, NY, USA},
series = {{PODS} '90},
title = {{On the Expressive Power of Datalog: Tools and a Case Study}},
url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/298514.298542},
doi = {10.1145/298514.298542},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} Symposium on {Principles} of {Database} {Systems}},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
author = {Kolaitis, Phokion G. and Vardi, Moshe Y.},
year = {1990}
}Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)
Showing 8 of 8 citing papers.
| Rank | Citing Paper | Year | Venue | Pagerank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 6,209 | On Datalog vs. Polynomial Time | 1991 | PODS | 5.9425753e-05 |
| 6,690 | Can Datalog be approximated? | 1994 | PODS | 5.8012926e-05 |
| 7,884 | Weaker Forms of Monotonicity for Declarative Networking: a More Fine-grained Answer to the CALM-conjecture | 2014 | PODS | 5.5229059e-05 |
| 12,032 | Logical Aspects of Massively Parallel and Distributed Systems | 2016 | PODS | 5.093636e-05 |
| 12,986 | Combinatorial Games in Database Theory | 1995 | PODS | 5.093636e-05 |
| 13,020 | Bounded Arity Datalog(!=) Queries on Graphs (Extended Abstract) | 1994 | PODS | 5.093636e-05 |
| 13,027 | Adding Disjunction to Datalog (Extended Abstract) | 1994 | PODS | 5.093636e-05 |
| 13,078 | Datalog Expressiveness of Chain Queries: Grammar Tools and Characterizations | 1992 | PODS | 5.093636e-05 |
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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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 174 | Decidability And Expressiveness Aspects Of Logic Queries | 1987 | PODS | 0.00027231487 |
| 2,763 | Inductive Pebble Games And The Expressive Power Of Datalog | 1989 | PODS | 8.1537086e-05 |
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| 10 | 2,763 | Inductive Pebble Games And The Expressive Power Of Datalog | 1989 | PODS |