Fast Identification of Relational Constraint Violations

Logical constraints, (e.g., 'phone numbers in toronto can have prefixes 416, 647, 905 only'), are ubiquitous in relational databases. Traditional integrity constraints, such as functional dependencies, are examples of such logical constraints as well. However, under frequent database updates, schema evolution and transformations, they can be easily violated. As a result, tables become inconsistent and data quality is degraded. In this paper we study the problem of validating collections of user defined constraints on a number of relational tables. Our primary goal is to quickly identify which tables violate such constraints. Logical constraints are potentially complex logical formuli, and we demonstrate that they cannot be efficiently evaluated by SQL queries. In order to enable fast identification of constraint violations, we propose to build and maintain specialized logical indices on the relational tables. We choose Boolean Decision Diagrams (BDD) as the index structure t...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ICDE
• Authors: Amit Chandel, Nick Koudas, Ken Q. Pu, Divesh Srivastava
• Keywords: Complex Logical Formuli, Database, ICDE 2007, Logical Constraints, Logical Indices