Subsumption between queries to object-oriented databases

Abstract

Most work on query optimization in relational and object-oriented databases has concentrated on tuning algebraic expressions and the physical access to the database contents. The attention to semantic query optimization, however, has been restricted due to its inherent complexity. We take a second look at semantic query optimization in object-oriented databases and find that reasoning techniques for concept languages developed in Artificial Intelligence apply to this problem because concept languages have been tailored for efficiency and their semantics is compatible with class and query definitions in object-oriented databases. We propose a query optimizer that recognizes subset relationships between a query and a view (a simpler query whose answer is stored) in polynomial time.