Querying aggregate data

Abstract

We introduce a first-order language with real polynomial arithmetic and aggregation operators (count, iterated sum and multiply), which is well suited for the definition of aggregate queries involving complex statistical functions. It offers a good trade-off between expressive power and complexity, with a tractable data complexity. Interestingly, some fundamental properties of first-order with real arithmetic are preserved in the presence of aggregates. In particular, there is an effective quantifier elimination for formulae with aggregation. We consider the problem of querying data that has already been aggregated in aggregate views, and focus on queries with an aggregation over a conjunctive query. Our main conceptual contribution is the introduction of a new equivalence relation among conjunctive queries, the isomorphism modulo a product. We prove that the equivalence of aggregate queries such as for instance averages reduces to it. Deciding if two queries are isomorphic modulo a p...