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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 547–553Cite as

Computationally Complete Relational Query Languages

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Synonyms

Complete query languages; Chandra and Harel complete query languages

Definition

A relational query language (or query language) is a set of expressions (or programs). The semantics of a query language defines for each of these expressions a corresponding query which is a generic, computable function from finite relation instances to finite relation instances over fixed schemas. A query language is computationally complete (or complete) if it defines all queries.

The genericity condition is a consistency criterion requiring that a query commute with isomorphisms of the database domain. Thus, when applied to isomorphic input relation instances, a query returns isomorphic output relation instances. The concept of genericity is based on the well-accepted idea that the result of a query should be independent of the representation of data in a database and should treat the elements of the database as uninterpreted objects [4]. The computability condition requires that the query can...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of California-San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA

    Victor Vianu

  2. Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA

    Dirk Van Gucht

Authors
  1. Victor Vianu
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  2. Dirk Van Gucht
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Victor Vianu .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK

    Leonid Libkin

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Vianu, V., Van Gucht, D. (2018). Computationally Complete Relational Query Languages. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_1243

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