Architecture of deductive database systems

Deductive databases are coming of age with the emergence of efficient and easy-to-use systems that support queries, reasoning, and application development on databases through declarative logic-based languages. The progress is demonstrated by the completion of prototype systems offering such levels of generality, performance, and robustness that they support well complex application development. An overview of the architectures and techniques of these systems is provided. The main motivations for development of the deductive database systems (DDSs) are: (1) to provide support for advanced database applications, with a focus on expert systems and knowledge-based applications; and (2) to provide better support for traditional database applications by integrating the application development and database queries into one language, thus solving the impedance mismatch problems. The key implementation problems for DDSs pertain to finding efficient executions for the given set of rules and queries. For this purpose, the DDS performs a global analysis of rules. The cornerstone of this analysis is the notion of bound arguments and free arguments of predicates.<>