We investigate the problem of identifying database repairs for missing tuples in query answers. We show that when the query is part of the input - the combined complexity setting - determining whether or not a repair exists is polynomial-time equivalent to the satisfiability problem for classes of queries admitting a weak form of projection and selection. We then identify the sub-classes of unions of conjunctive queries with negated atoms, defined by the relational algebra operations permitted to appear in the query, for which the minimal repair problem can be solved in polynomial time. In contrast, we show that the problem is NP-hard, as well as set cover-hard to approximate via strict reductions, whenever both projection and join are permitted in the input query. Additionally, we show that finding the size of a minimal repair for unions of conjunctive queries (with negated atoms permitted) is OptP[log(n)]-complete, while computing a minimal repair is possible with O(n²) queries to an NP oracle. With recursion permitted, the combined complexity of all of these variants increases significantly, with an EXP lower bound. However, from the data complexity perspective, we show that minimal repairs can be identified in polynomial time for all queries expressible as semi-positive datalog programs.

We show that the guarded-negation fragment is, in a precise sense, the smallest extension of the guarded fragment with Craig interpolation. In contrast, we show that full first-order logic is the smallest extension of both the two-variable fragment and the forward fragment with Craig interpolation. Similarly, we also show that all extensions of the two-variable fragment and of the fluted fragment with Craig interpolation are undecidable.

The class of hierarchical queries is known to define the boundary of the dichotomy between tractability and intractability for the following two extensively studied problems about self-join free Boolean conjunctive queries (SJF-BCQ): (i) evaluating a SJF-BCQ on a tuple-independent probabilistic database; (ii) computing the Shapley value of a fact in a database on which a SJF-BCQ evaluates to true. Here, we establish that hierarchical queries define also the boundary of the dichotomy between tractability and intractability for a different natural algorithmic problem, which we call the bag-set maximization problem. The bag-set maximization problem associated with a SJF-BCQ Q asks: given a database D, find the biggest value that Q takes under bag semantics on a database D' obtained from D by adding at most θ facts from another given database D r . For non-hierarchical queries, we show that the bag-set maximization problem is an NP-complete optimization problem. More significantly, for hierarchical queries, we show that all three aforementioned problems (probabilistic query evaluation, Shapley value computation, and bag-set maximization) admit a single unifying polynomial-time algorithm that operates on an abstract algebraic structure, called a 2-monoid . Each of the three problems requires a different instantiation of the 2-monoid tailored for the problem at hand.

Abstract We show that the guarded-negation fragment (GNFO) is, in a precise sense, the smallest extension of the guarded fragment (GFO) with Craig interpolation. In contrast, we show that the smallest extension of the two-variable fragment ( $$\textrm{FO}^2 $$ FO 2 ), and of the forward fragment (FF) with Craig interpolation, is full first-order logic. Similarly, we also show that all extensions of $$\textrm{FO}^2 $$ FO 2 and of the fluted fragment (FL) with Craig interpolation are undecidable.