Engineering applications that use Active DBMSs (ADBMSs) often need to group activities into modes that are shifted during the execution of different tasks. This paper presents a mechanism for grouping rules into contexts that can be activated and deactivated dynamically. The ADBMS monitors only those events that affect rules of activated contexts. By dynamic rule grouping the rules to be monito...

The emergence of electronic stored-program computers in contain the 1940s marks a break with past developments in machine calculation. Drawing on the work of various historians, I attempt to define the essence of that break and therefore of the modern computer. I conclude that the generally used distinction between computers and precursor machines in terms of the stored-program concept and von ...

In economics comparative analysis plays the same role as experimental research in physics. In this paper we closely examine several methodological problems related to comparative analysis by investigating the specific example of grain markets in China and France respectively. This enables us to answer a question in economic history which has so far remained pending, namely whether or not market...

This paper investigates links between corruption and collusion in procurement. A …rst-price multiple-object auction is administered by an agent who has legal discretion to allow for a readjustment of (all) submitted o¤ers before the o¢ cial opening. The agent may be corrupt, i.e. willing to “sell”his decision in exchange for a bribe. Our main result shows that the corrupt agent’s incentives to ...

In this paper, we analyze the spending decisions of over 1.5 million Americans who vary in their degree of revealed credit constraints. Specifically, we analyze how these Americans spend their income tax refunds, using transaction-level data from a stored-value card product. Card-holders may choose among several tax settlement and loan options, effectively receiving cash as much as 90 days earl...

The structures called organ-matrix and cell-matrix are introduced. Organ-matrices contain data and operators as data, which can be stored in database tables and reflect business logic in particular business domain. An algorithm can be presented by one row of an organ-matrix. A set of algorithms in a particular business domain can be represented by an entire organ-matrix. It’s shown that an orga...

Weight and cardinality constraints constitute a very useful programming construct widely adopted in Answer Set Programming (ASP). In recent work we have proposed RASP, an extension to plain ASP where complex forms of preferences can be flexibly expressed. In this paper, we illustrate an application of these preferences within weight/cardinality constraints. We emphasize, mainly by simple exampl...

Context Enterprise databases contain not only data but also queries: • view definitions • stored procedures • usage logs • workloads • software engineering Stored as long strings… ! Difficult to query in standard SQL

This paper investigates a tuple-oriented approach to tabulation. In this approach solutions to a call are stored and computed one at a time, which results in tables contain incomplete sets of solutions. Since the answers stored in the tables are partial sets of solutions to a call, a subgoal that is an instance of a stored call can require an answer that is not among the stored solutions. Conse...