An amateur's introduction to recursive query processing strategies

This paper surveys and compares various strategies for processing logic queries in relational databases. The survey and comparison is limited to the case of Horn Clauses with evaluable predicates but without function symbols. The paper is organized in three parts. In the first part, we introduce the main concepts and definitions. In the second, we describe the various strategies. For each strategy, we give its main characteristics, its application range and a detailed description. We also give an example of a query evaluation. The third part of the paper compares the strategies on performance grounds. We first present a set of sample rules and queries which are used for the performance comparisons, and then we characterize the data. Finally, we give an analytical solution for each query/rule system. Cost curves are plotted for specific configurations of the data.