During the early days of relational database theory it was realized that "acyclic" database schemas possess a number of desirable properties. In fact, three different notions of "acyclicity" were identified and investigated during the 1980s, namely, α-acyclicity, β-acyclicity, and γ-acyclicity. Much more recently, the study of α-acyclicity was extended to annotated relations, where the annotations are values from some positive commutative monoid. The recent results about α-acyclic schemas and annotated relations give rise to results about β-acyclic schemas and annotated relations, since a schema is β-acyclic if and only if every sub-schema of it is α-acyclic. Here, we study γ-acyclic schemas and annotated relations. Our main finding is that the characterization of γ-acyclic schemas in terms of monotone sequential join expression extends to annotated relations, provided the annotations come from a positive commutative monoid that has the inner consistency property. Furthermore, the results reported here shed light on the role of the join of two standard relations. Specifically, our results reveal that the only relevant property of the join of two standard relations is that it is a witness to the consistency of the two relations, provided that these two relations are consistent. For the more abstract setting of annotated relations, this property of the standard join is captured by the notion of a consistency witness function, a notion which we systematically utilize in this work.

We study the status of classical model-theoretic preservation theorems such as the Łoś-Tarski theorem and the homomorphism preservation theorem in the context of semiring semantics. Semiring semantics has its origins in the provenance analysis of database queries but has been extended to a systematic way of evaluating logical statements to values in a commutative semiring. Depending on the underlying semiring, this allows us to track descriptions of the atomic facts that are responsible for the truth of a statement or practical information about the evaluation such as costs or confidence. The systematic development of semiring semantics for first-order logic and other logical systems raises the question to what extent classical model-theoretic results can be generalised to this setting and how such results depend on the underlying semiring. The definitions of semantic properties such as preservation under extensions, substructures, or homomorphisms naturally generalise to the setting of semiring semantics. However, the status of the corresponding preservation theorem strongly depends on the algebraic properties of the particular semirings. We prove that these preservation theorems do indeed hold for all lattice semirings (a quite large class, encompassing practically relevant semirings and in particular all min-max semirings). The proofs combine adaptations of the classical compactness and amalgamation methods with specific reduction methods for logical entailment that have been developed in semiring semantics. On the other side, variants of the existential preservation theorem fail for many other semirings, including the tropical semiring, the Viterbi semiring, the Łukasiewicz semiring, and the natural semirings ℕ and ℕ^∞. Surprisingly, the existential preservation theorem does hold for finite interpretations in a number of semirings, including the three-element min-max semiring, which extends the Boolean by just a single additional truth value. Thus, the situation for these semirings is in sharp contrast to the Boolean case, where the Łoś-Tarski theorem holds in general, but not in the finite.