English

LinCQA: Faster Consistent Query Answering with Linear Time Guarantees

Databases 2022-08-29 v1

Abstract

Most data analytical pipelines often encounter the problem of querying inconsistent data that violate pre-determined integrity constraints. Data cleaning is an extensively studied paradigm that singles out a consistent repair of the inconsistent data. Consistent query answering (CQA) is an alternative approach to data cleaning that asks for all tuples guaranteed to be returned by a given query on all (in most cases, exponentially many) repairs of the inconsistent data. This paper identifies a class of acyclic select-project-join (SPJ) queries for which CQA can be solved via SQL rewriting with a linear time guarantee. Our rewriting method can be viewed as a generalization of Yannakakis's algorithm for acyclic joins to the inconsistent setting. We present LinCQA, a system that can output rewritings in both SQL and non-recursive Datalog rules for every query in this class. We show that LinCQA often outperforms the existing CQA systems on both synthetic and real-world workloads, and in some cases, by orders of magnitude.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2208.12339,
  title  = {LinCQA: Faster Consistent Query Answering with Linear Time Guarantees},
  author = {Zhiwei Fan and Paraschos Koutris and Xiating Ouyang and Jef Wijsen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2208.12339},
  year   = {2022}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-25T01:59:15.887Z