Database Theory
Database Theory
Course with SWS 4/2/0 (lecture/exercise/practical) in SS 2019
Lecturer
Tutor
SWS
- 4/2/0
Modules
Examination method
- Oral exam
Lecture series
Databases are a key technology in computer science that brings together fascinating theoretical topics and highly relevant practical applications. The goal of this lecture is to give an extended introduction to this interesting field, with a special focus on database query languages, their expressive power, and computational complexity. The lecture will introduce the relational data model, and then discuss theoretical and practical aspects of a variety of query languages:
- first-order logic as a query language and the relational algebra
- conjunctive queries and their unions
- navigational queries: path queries
- Datalog and its relatives
- query answering under database dependencies
The lecture focuses on core principles that apply to many types of databases alike (relational, graph-based, semantic web). Some important query answering algorithms are presented, too, but otherwise, the details of database implementation and administration are not covered.
Prerequisites
An undergraduate-level knowledge of predicate logic, regular languages, and algorithmic and computational complexity is required. The lecture will connect with other topics in the Computer Science and Computational Logic curriculum, such as relational databases, logic programming, and Semantic Web technologies – familiarity with these topics is not required to follow the lecture.
Schedule and Location
All sessions will take place in room APB/E005. The default arrangement is as follows:
- The weekly lecture sessions will take place on Tuesday DS2 (9:20 to 10:50) and Friday DS5 (2:50 to 4:20).
- The weekly exercise session will take place on Wednesday DS3 (11:10 to 12:40).
In some weeks, the Wednesday exercises will be swapped with the Friday lectures
Exceptions:
- The first exercise session will take place in the second week on 12 April 2019.
- There will NOT be a lecture on the 5th of April.
Legacy
This course has first been taught at TU Dresden in the form of the 2015 lecture Foundations of Databases and Query Languages and the 2018 lecture Database Theory. The plan for this year's course will be very similar.
The structure of some of the lectures of this course is inspired by the course Theory of Data and Knowledge Bases in the version given by Georg Gottlob and Thomas Lukasiewicz at the University of Oxford.The main reference textbook for the lecture is:
- Serge Abiteboul, Richard Hull, Victor Vianu: Foundations of Databases. Addison-Wesley. 1994.
- The book is available for free from its webpage, but there are also copies in the library.
Further texts might be consulted for background information and additional details:
- Michael Sipser: Introduction to the Theory of Computation. 2005
- Accessible introduction to complexity theory that covers all topics of computational complexity that the lecture touches upon.
- Evgeny Dantsin, Thomas Eiter, Georg Gottlob, Andrei Voronkov: Complexity and expressive power of logic programming. ACM Computing Surveys, 33:3, pp 374-425, 2001.
- Covers all Datalog complexity results mentioned in the lecture. Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/502807.502810 (may require access from within a university network)
- additional references will be added in the course of the lecture
Subscribe to events of this course (icalendar)
| Lecture | Introduction/Relational Data Model | DS2, April 2, 2019 in APB E005 | File 1, File 2 |
| Lecture | First-Order Queries (part 1) | DS2, April 9, 2019 in APB E005 | File 1, File 2 |
| Lecture | First-Order Queries (part 2) | DS3, April 10, 2019 in APB E005 | |
| Exercise | Relational Algebra | DS5, April 12, 2019 in APB E005 | File |
| Lecture | Complexity of Query Answering | DS2, April 16, 2019 in APB E005 | File 1, File 2 |
| Exercise | First-Order Queries | DS3, April 17, 2019 in APB E005 | File |
| Lecture | Complexity of FO Query Answering (1) | DS2, April 23, 2019 in APB E005 | File 1, File 2 |
| Lecture | Complexity of FO Query Answering (2) | DS3, April 24, 2019 in APB E005 | File 1, File 2 |
| Exercise | Complexity of FO Query Answering | DS5, April 26, 2019 in APB E005 | File |
| Lecture | Conjunctive Queries | DS2, April 30, 2019 in APB E005 | File 1, File 2 |
| Lecture | Tree-Like Conjunctive Queries (1) | DS5, May 3, 2019 in APB E005 | File 1, File 2 |
| Lecture | Tree-Like Conjunctive Queries (2) | DS2, May 7, 2019 in APB E005 | File 1, File 2 |
| Lecture | Query Optimisation | DS3, May 8, 2019 in APB E005 | File 1, File 2 |
| Exercise | Conjunctive Queries, CSP, and Hypergraphs | DS5, May 10, 2019 in APB E005 | File |
| Lecture | Conjunctive Query Optimisation | DS2, May 14, 2019 in APB E005 | File 1, File 2 |
| Lecture | Query Expressiveness (Part 1) | DS3, May 15, 2019 in APB E005 | File 1, File 2 |
| Exercise | Treewidth and Hypertreewidth | DS5, May 17, 2019 in APB E005 | File |
| Lecture | Query Expressiveness (Part 2) | DS2, May 21, 2019 in APB E005 | |
| Exercise | Trakhtenbrot's Theorem | DS5, May 24, 2019 in APB E005 | File |
| Lecture | Introduction to Datalog | DS2, May 28, 2019 in APB E005 | File 1, File 2 |
| Lecture | Datalog Complexity | DS3, May 29, 2019 in APB E005 | File 1, File 2 |
| Exercise | Query Optimisation and FO Query Expressivity | DS5, May 31, 2019 in APB E005 | File |
| Lecture | Datalog Evaluation (1) | DS2, June 4, 2019 in APB E005 | File 1, File 2 |
| Lecture | Datalog Evaluation (2) | DS3, June 5, 2019 in APB E005 | File 1, File 2 |
| Exercise | Datalog | DS5, June 7, 2019 in APB E005 | File |
| Lecture | Graph Databases and Path Queries | DS2, June 18, 2019 in APB E005 | File 1, File 2 |
| Lecture | (Cancelled) | DS2, June 25, 2019 in APB E005 | |
| Exercise | (Cancelled) | DS3, June 26, 2019 in APB E005 | File |
| Exercise | Datalog Evaluation | DS5, June 28, 2019 in APB E005 | File |
| Lecture | Dependencies | DS2, July 2, 2019 in APB E005 | File 1, File 2 |
| Lecture | The Chase | DS3, July 3, 2019 in APB E005 | File 1, File 2 |
| Exercise | Graph Databases and Path Queries | DS5, July 5, 2019 in APB E005 | File |
| Lecture | Query Answering Beyond Acyclic TGDs | DS2, July 9, 2019 in APB E005 | File 1, File 2 |
| Lecture | Outlook | DS3, July 10, 2019 in APB E005 | File 1, File 2 |
| Exercise | Dependencies | DS5, July 12, 2019 in APB E005 | File |
Calendar
