Oliver Duschka , Michael Genesereth , Alon Levy , Recursive Query Plans for Data Integration Journal of Logic Programming, special issue on Logic Based HeterogeneousInformation Systems 2000
Abstract: Generating query-answering plans for data integration systems
requires to translate a user query, formulated in terms of a mediated
schema, to a query that uses relations that are actually
stored in data sources. Previous solutions to the translation
problem produced sets of conjunctive plans, and were therefore
limited in their ability to handle recursive queries and to
exploit data sources with
binding-pattern limitations and functional dependencies that are known
to hold in the mediated schema. As a result, these plans were incomplete w.r.t.
sources encountered in practice (i.e., produced only a subset of the
possible answers). We describe the novel class of recursive
query answering plans, which enables us to settle three open
problems.
First, we describe an algorithm for finding a query plan
that produces the maximal set of answers from the sources
for arbitrary recursive queries.
Second, we extend this algorithm to use the presence of functional
and full dependencies in the mediated schema.
Third, we describe an
algorithm for finding the maximal query plan
in the presence of binding-pattern restrictions in the
sources. In all three cases, recursive plans are necessary in order to
obtain a maximal query plan.