What Makes a Variant of Query Determinacy (Un)Decidable? (Invited Talk)

Abstract

This paper was written as the companion paper of the ICDT 2020 invited tutorial. Query determinacy is a broad topic, with literally hundreds of papers published since late 1980s. This paper is not going to be a “survey” but rather a personal perspective of a person somehow involved in the recent developments in the area. First I explain how, in the last 30+ years, the question of determinacy was formalized. There are many parameters here: obviously one needs to choose the query language of the available views and the query language of the query itself. But – surprisingly – there is also some choice regarding what the word “to compute” actually means in this context. Then I concentrate on certain variants of the decision problem of determinacy (for each choice of parameters there is one such problem) and explain how I understand the mechanisms rendering such variants of determinacy decidable or undecidable. This is on a rather informal level. No really new theorems are presented, but I show some improvements of existing theorems and also simplified proofs of some of the earlier results. 2012 ACM Subject Classification Theory of computation → Database theory