German National Research Center for Information Technology

2 The " Arbeitspapiere der GMD – GMD Technical Reports " primarily comprise preliminary publications, specific partial results and complementary material. In the interest of a subsequent final publication the " Arbeitspapiere/Technical Reports " should not be copied. Critical comments would be appreciated by the authors. No part of this publication may be reproduced or further processed in any form or by any means without the prior permission of GMD. All rights reserved. Abstract Efficient evaluation strategies for declarative update queries have rarely been investigated. Due to possible dependencies between the resulting database state and the order in which records/ob-jects are processed, usually update queries are evaluated in a set-oriented way in order to ensure a deterministic evaluation. In this paper, we show that such dependencies can be detected by exploiting knowledge about conflicts between the operations that are used to access the database during the query evaluation. Thus most update queries can also be evaluated deterministically, and in some cases more efficiently, in a record-oriented way. We show that some of the detected conflicts can be relaxed or even be ignored, while a deterministic evaluation can still be guaranteed .