Conjunctive-query containment and constraint satisfaction

Conjunctive-query containment is recognized as a fundamental problem in database query evaluation and optimization. At the same time, constraint satisfaction is recognized as a fundamental problem in artificial intelligence. What do conjunctive-query containment and constraint satisfaction have in common? Our main conceptual contribution in this paper is to point out that, despite their very different formulation, conjunctive-query containment and constraint satisfaction are essentially the same problem. The reason is that they can be recast as the following fundamental algebraic problem: given two finite relational structures A and B, is there a homomorphism h:A?B? As formulated above, the homomorphism problem is uniform in the sense that both relational structures A and B are part of the input. By fixing the structure B, one obtains the following nonuniform problem: given a finite relational structure A, is there a homomorphism h:A?B? In general, nonuniform tractability results do not uniformize. Thus, it is natural to ask: which tractable cases of nonuniform tractability results for constraint satisfaction and conjunctive-query containment do uniformize? Our main technical contribution in this paper is to show that several cases of tractable nonuniform constraint-satisfaction problems do indeed uniformize. We exhibit three nonuniform tractability results that uniformize and, thus, give rise to polynomial-time solvable cases of constraint satisfaction and conjunctive-query containment. We begin by examining the tractable cases of Boolean constraint-satisfaction problems and show that they do uniformize. This can be applied to conjunctive-query containment via Booleanization; in particular, it yields one of the known tractable cases of conjunctive-query containment. After this, we show that tractability results for constraint-satisfaction problems that can be expressed using Datalog programs with bounded number of distinct variables also uniformize. Finally, we provide a new proof for the fact that tractability results for queries with bounded treewidth uniformize as well, via a connection with first-order logic with a bounded number of distinct variables.

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