A New Method for Integrity Constraint Checking in Deductive Databases

In the literature, several integrity checking methods for updates in deductive databases are described. All these methods try to instantiate the speciied integrity constraints with the update in order to constrain the full check to only a relevant part of the database. Globally, they can be divided in two major classes of methods; methods based on \induced updates" and methods based on \potential updates". In this article a new method will be presented. This method represents also a new class of methods. While in the rst two classes one has to generate induced updates and potential updates respectivily, even if they are not relevant to any of the constraints, the new method, which will be called the \method based on inconsistency rules", does not have this drawback. Therefore, the proposed method is potentially far more eecient than any other method based on induced updates or potential updates.