This paper considers the problem of reasoning on massive amounts of (possibly distributed) data. Presently, existing proposals show some limitations: {\em (i)} the quantity of data that can be handled contemporarily is limited, due to the fact that reasoning is generally carried out in main-memory; {\em (ii)} the interaction with external (and independent) DBMSs is not trivial and, in several cases, not allowed at all; {\em (iii)} the efficiency of present implementations is still not sufficient for their utilization in complex reasoning tasks involving massive amounts of data. This paper provides a contribution in this setting; it presents a new system, called DLVDB, which aims to solve these problems. Moreover, the paper reports the results of a thorough experimental analysis we have carried out for comparing our system with several state-of-the-art systems (both logic and databases) on some classical deductive problems; the other tested systems are: LDL++, XSB, Smodels and three top-level commercial DBMSs. DLVDB significantly outperforms even the commercial Database Systems on recursive queries. To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP)
@article{arxiv.0704.3157,
title = {Experimenting with recursive queries in database and logic programming systems},
author = {Giorgio Terracina and Nicola Leone and Vincenzino Lio and Claudio Panetta},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0704.3157},
year = {2007}
}