Towards a Logical Semantics for Referential Actions in SQL

We investigate a logical semantics which unambiguously speciies the meaning of SQL-like referential actions of the form ON DELETE CASCADE and ON DELETE RESTRICT. The semantics is given by a translation of referential actions into logical rules. The proposed semantics is less restrictive than the standard SQL semantics, yet preserves all referential integrity constraints. First, a preliminary set of rules is introduced which rejects a set of user requests if a single request is rejected. Subsequently, a reened translation is presented using Statelog LHL95], a state-oriented Datalog extension which allows to deene active and de-ductive rules within a uniied framework. We show that our semantics yields the maximal admissible subset of a given set of user requests. Apart from the Statelog formalization, a three-valued formalization based on the well-founded semantics and an equivalent game-theoretic speciication are presented, which give further insight into the problem of ambiguity of triggers.