Query Containment Checking as a View Updating Problem

In this paper we present a new approach that handles query containment problems by expressing them as a view updating problem. Since this approach is independent of any particular view updating method, it provides a general framework that joins research efforts in both the query containment checking and view updating fields. In particular, the larger development of current view updating technology allows us to check properly query containment when considering negative-derived literals or integrity constraints. Existing methods for query containment checking that deal with these cases do not check actually containment but another related property called uniform containment, which is a sufficient but not necessary condition for containment. Therefore, an important outcome of our proposal is that, to the best of our knowledge, it is the first approach that checks “true” query containment instead of uniform query containment in the presence of negation and integrity constraints.