Safety and correct translation of relational calculus formulas
Allen Van Gelder, Rodney W. Topor · 1987
Not all queries in relational calculus can be answered “sensibly” once disjunction, negation, and universal quantification are allowed. The class of relational calculus queries, or formulas, that have “sensible” answers is called the domain independent class, which is known to be undecidable. Subsequent research has focused on identifying large decidable subclasses of domain independent formulas In this paper we investigate the properties of two such classes the evaluable formulas and the allowed formulas. Although both classes have been defined before, we give simplified definitions, present short proofs of their man properties, and describe a method to incorporate equality.