Providing support for full relational algebra in probabilistic databases

Extensive work has recently been done on the evaluation of positive queries on probabilistic databases. The case of queries with negation has notoriously been left out, since it raises serious additional challenges to efficient query evaluation. This paper provides a complete framework for the evaluation of full relational algebra queries in probabilistic databases. In particular, it proposes exact and approximate evaluation techniques for relational algebra queries on representation systems that can accommodate any finite probability space over relational databases. Key ingredients to these techniques are (1) the manipulation of nested propositional expressions used for probability computation without unfolding them into disjunctive normal form, and (2) efficient computation of lower and upper probability bounds of such expressions by deriving coarser expressions in tractable theories such as one occurrence form. We complement our evaluation techniques with a tractability map for relational algebra queries without repeating relation symbols and for quantified queries such as set inclusion, equality, incomparability, and relational division, which are expressible in relational algebra using nested negation and repeating relation symbols. Based on this tractability study, we syntactically define a practical class of tractable relational algebra queries. We incorporated this framework in the SPROUT engine and show its efficiency experimentally in TPC-H and RFID scenarios.