Does query evaluation tractability help query containment?
Pablo Barceló, Miguel Romero, Moshe Y. Vardi · 2014
While checking containment of Datalog programs is undecidable, checking whether a Datalog program is contained in a union of conjunctive queries (UCQ), in the context of relational databases, or a union of conjunctive 2-way regular path queries (UC2RPQ), in the context of graph databases, is decidable. The complexity of these problems is, however, prohibitive: 2exptime-complete. We investigate to which extent restrictions on UCQs and UC2RPQs, which have been known to reduce the complexity of query containment for these classes, yield a more "manageable" single-exponential time bound, which is the norm for several static analysis and verification tasks.