Termination of oblivious chase is undecidable
Abstract
We show that all--instances termination of chase is undecidable. More precisely, there is no algorithm deciding, for a given set consisting of Tuple Generating Dependencies (a.k.a. Datalog program), whether the -chase on will terminate for every finite database instance . Our method applies to Oblivious Chase, Semi-Oblivious Chase and -- after a slight modification -- also for Standard Chase. This means that we give a (negative) solution to the all--instances termination problem for all version of chase that are usually considered. The arity we need for our undecidability proof is three. We also show that the problem is EXPSPACE-hard for binary signatures, but decidability for this case is left open. Both the proofs -- for ternary and binary signatures -- are easy. Once you know them.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1401.4840,
title = {Termination of oblivious chase is undecidable},
author = {Tomasz Gogacz and Jerzy Marcinkowski},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1401.4840},
year = {2015}
}