Abstract
Database queries can be expressed as constraints imposed on the solution set of data items in the database. We propose an approach to incremental partial evaluation of queries in which we treat the index as a hierarchically tiered set of constraints which specify the sets of data items that can be found under subtrees of the index. At any given point in the evaluation, we proceed by propagating the constraints from the index structure into the query. The result is a general framework for making full use of index information in evaluation of queries, even for complex data types, that minimises fetches of blocks from disk for which there is sufficient information in the indices to deduce that they cannot contain data items that participate in the answer. The approach supports complex selections, joins, sorting and other database query operations.
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© 1996 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Sexton, A.P. (1996). Querying indexed files. In: Gaede, V., Brodsky, A., Günther, O., Srivastava, D., Vianu, V., Wallace, M. (eds) Constraint Databases and Applications. CDB 1997. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1191. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-62501-1_37
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-62501-1_37
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