FOLRE: A Deductive Database System for the Integrated Treatment of Updates

We present in this paper both a novel theoretically well-founded framework for integrating the treatment of advanced update and rule enforcement problems in deductive databases and the architecture of a new deductive database management system based upon such a framework. Our results extend the query-processing and basic updating functionalities provided by current deductive database systems with integrated view updating and materialization, integrity checking and maintenance, and condition monitoring; both for on-line updates and predefined transactions. The distinguishing feature of our approach is the underlying integrative framework used to specify and combine update problems which facilitates their implementation. Our system bears an architecture consisting of a deductive front-end that takes care of any updating task, working on a preexisting deductive back-end that handles all storage, retrieval and transaction management issues. Since the integrated treatment of advanced updating is an important issue both for deductive databases and for other database models, we hope that our approach helps to fill an important gap within current database technology.