Universal Finiteness and Satisfiability.
Inderpal Singh Mumick, Oded Shmueli · 1994
) Inderpal Singh Mumick AT&T Bell Laboratories [email protected] Oded Shmueli Technion [email protected] Abstract The problem of determining whether, for every extensional database, a given predicate in a given program has a finite number of derivations is called the universal finiteness problem. The problem of determining whether a given predicate in a given program has a non-empty extension for some extensional database is called the satisfiability problem. We show that the universal finiteness problem can be reduced to the satisfiability problem. Thus all decidability results for satisfiability can be applied to universal finiteness - for example, we can infer that the universal finiteness problem is decidable for Datalog extended with negation on base predicates. The satisfiability problem can be easily reduced to the universal finiteness problem, so that all undecidability results for satisfiability can be applied to universal finiteness. For example we can infer t...