Relational Expressive Power of Constraint Query Languages

Summary: Shows recursive queries (parity, transitive closure) are inexpressible in relational calculus with polynomial inequalities over R. Establishes collapse: generic Boolean queries with many constraint classes collapse to the constraint-free relational calculus under both active-domain and natural semantics, using Ramsey-type combinatorics and nonstandard/model-theoretic methods. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: h97cf20585d659912
Venue: PODS
Year: 1996
Pagerank: 9.3195393e-05
Overall Rank: 1,950 | 86.90%
DOI: 10.1145/237661.237667

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Michael Benedikt (AT&T)
2. Guozhu Dong (University of Melbourne)
3. Leonid Libkin (AT&T)
4. Limsoon Wong (Institute of Systems Science)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{benedikt_pods96,
        address = {New York, NY, USA},
        series = {{PODS} '96},
        title = {{Relational Expressive Power of Constraint Query Languages}},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/237661.237667},
        doi = {10.1145/237661.237667},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} Symposium on {Principles} of {Database} {Systems}},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        author = {Benedikt, Michael and Dong, Guozhu and Libkin, Leonid and Wong, Limsoon},
        year = {1996}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 16 of 16 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
3,612	On the Decidability of Semi-Linearity for Semi-Algebraic Sets and its Implications for Spatial Databases (extended abstract)	1997	PODS	7.1626242e-05
3,771	Topological Queries in Spatial Databases	1996	PODS	7.0297786e-05
4,110	Linear vs. Order Constraint Queries Over Rational Databases (Extended Abstract)	1996	PODS	6.8008012e-05
4,292	An Expressive Language for Linear Spatial Database Queries (extended abstract)	1998	PODS	6.6820595e-05
4,317	Safe Constraint Queries	1998	PODS	6.6681018e-05
4,426	Languages for Relational Databases over Interpreted Structures	1997	PODS	6.6038751e-05
4,640	Exact and Approximate Aggregation in Constraint Query Languages	1999	PODS	6.4903073e-05
5,429	Querying Spatial Databases via Topological Invariants	1998	PODS	6.1337552e-05
5,602	Verifiable Properties of Database Transactions	1996	PODS	6.0703115e-05
5,841	On the Containment and Equivalence of Database Queries with Linear Constraints* (Extended Abstract)	1997	PODS	5.9735439e-05
6,020	The 3W Model and Algebra for Unified Data Mining	2000	VLDB	5.9129763e-05
8,726	Towards Practical Constraint Databases (Extended Abstract)	1996	PODS	5.2905577e-05
12,129	Personal Insights for Altering Decisions of Tree-based Ensembles over Time	2020	VLDB	4.9793485e-05
13,053	A characterization of first-order topological properties of planar spatial data (Extended abstract)	2004	PODS	4.9793485e-05
13,164	Reachability and Connectivity Queries in Constraint Databases	2000	PODS	4.9793485e-05
13,169	Uniform Generation in Spatial Constraint Databases and Applications	2000	PODS	4.9793485e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 5 of 5 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
914	Constraint Programming and Database Languages: A Tutorial	1995	PODS	0.00013104061
1,512	Towards a Theory of Spatial Database Queries (Extended Abstract)	1994	PODS	0.00010429539
2,169	Normal Forms and Conservative Properties for Query Languages over Collection Types	1993	PODS	8.9247938e-05
2,292	Finitely Representable Databases	1994	PODS	8.6854411e-05
4,110	Linear vs. Order Constraint Queries Over Rational Databases (Extended Abstract)	1996	PODS	6.8008012e-05

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