Database theory encapsulates a broad range of topics related to the study and research of the theoretical realm of databases and database management systems.
Theoretical aspects of data management include, among other areas, the foundations of query languages, computational complexity and expressive power of queries, finite model theory, database design theory, dependency theory, foundations of concurrency control and database recovery, deductive databases, temporal and spatial databases, real-time databases, managing uncertain data and probabilistic databases, and Web data.
Most research work has traditionally been based on the relational model, since this model is usually considered the simplest and most foundational model of interest. Corresponding results for other data models, such as object-oriented or semi-structured models, or, more recently, graph data models and XML, are often derivable from those for the relational model.
Database theory helps one to understand the complexity and power of query languages and their connection to logic. Starting from relational algebra and first-order logic (which are equivalent by Codd's theorem) and the insight that important queries such as graph reachability are not expressible in this language, more powerful language based on logic programming and fixpoint logic such as datalog were studied. The theory also explores foundations of query optimization and data integration. Here most work studied conjunctive queries, which admit query optimization even under constraints using the chase algorithm.
The main research conferences in the area are the ACM Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (PODS) and the International Conference on Database Theory (ICDT).
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Query optimization is a feature of many relational database management systems and other databases such as NoSQL and graph databases. The query optimizer attempts to determine the most efficient way to execute a given query by considering the possible query plans. Generally, the query optimizer cannot be accessed directly by users: once queries are submitted to the database server, and parsed by the parser, they are then passed to the query optimizer where optimization occurs.
Datalog is a declarative logic programming language. While it is syntactically a subset of Prolog, Datalog generally uses a bottom-up rather than top-down evaluation model. This difference yields significantly different behavior and properties from Prolog. It is often used as a query language for deductive databases. Datalog has been applied to problems in data integration, networking, program analysis, and more. A Datalog program consists of facts, which are statements that are held to be true, and rules, which say how to deduce new facts from known facts.
The relational model (RM) is an approach to managing data using a structure and language consistent with first-order predicate logic, first described in 1969 by English computer scientist Edgar F. Codd, where all data is represented in terms of tuples, grouped into relations. A database organized in terms of the relational model is a relational database.
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