On Datalog vs. Polynomial Time
Summary: Proves existence of monotone PTIME queries not expressible in several Datalog variants. Uses monotone circuit lower bounds and a novel "Pumping Lemma" for Datalog to pinpoint inherent expressiveness limitations. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)
Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time
Authors
- 1. Foto Afrati (National Technical University of Athens)
- 2. Stavros S. Cosmadakis (IBM)
- 3. Mihalis Yannakakis (AT&T)
BibTeX Citation
@inproceedings{afrati_pods91,
address = {New York, NY, USA},
series = {{PODS} '91},
title = {{On Datalog vs. Polynomial Time}},
url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/113413.113415},
doi = {10.1145/113413.113415},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} Symposium on {Principles} of {Database} {Systems}},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
author = {Afrati, Foto and Cosmadakis, Stavros S. and Yannakakis, Mihalis},
year = {1991}
}Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)
Showing 3 of 3 citing papers.
| Rank | Citing Paper | Year | Venue | Pagerank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 13,276 | Combinatorial Games in Database Theory | 1995 | PODS | 4.9793485e-05 |
| 13,310 | Bounded Arity Datalog(!=) Queries on Graphs (Extended Abstract) | 1994 | PODS | 4.9793485e-05 |
| 13,368 | Datalog Expressiveness of Chain Queries: Grammar Tools and Characterizations | 1992 | PODS | 4.9793485e-05 |
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Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)
Showing 3 of 3 cited papers.
Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.
| Rank | Cited Paper | Year | Venue | Pagerank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 177 | Decidability And Expressiveness Aspects Of Logic Queries | 1987 | PODS | 0.000266613 |
| 2,822 | Inductive Pebble Games And The Expressive Power Of Datalog | 1989 | PODS | 7.9707629e-05 |
| 3,876 | On the Expressive Power of Datalog: Tools and a Case Study | 1990 | PODS | 6.9534856e-05 |
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