Declarative reasoning extensions to commercial SQL database management systems

The deduction capabilities for existing distributed relational databases are discussed. The propagation SQL-based systems are considered, and alternative strategies for providing inferencing and declarative reasoning capabilities on heterogeneous databases are presented. It is concluded that there is a trend towards distributed computational environments which primarily utilize heterogeneous SQL-based database management systems. Hence, it becomes increasingly important to integrate the accesses to these heterogeneous commercial databases through programming techniques which allow the specification of multiple persistent objects in the same program without worrying where the individual objects are stored, or on what platform, or through which commercial database management system. It also becomes important to support declarative reasoning database languages on these heterogeneous distributed databases.<>