Conjunctive Query Rewriting in the Context of Data Integration

The problem of query rewriting using views has interested in the context of data integration where source data is described by the views on global relations. When the query and views are of the form of conjunctive queries, the rewriting is a union of conjunctive queries each of which is contained in the original query and consists of only views. Most previous methods for query rewriting using views are 2-step algorithms. In the first step, they identify the views that are useful in rewriting and in the second step they construct all correct rewritings by combining the views that gained in the first step. The larger the number of selected views in the first step, the larger the number of candidate rewritings in the second step. We want to minimize the number of selected views in the first step by defining stringent conditions for a view to be participated in rewritings. In this paper, first we offer a necessary condition for the existence of a rewriting that includes a view. For the common case that predicate repetitions are not allowed in the bodies of views, we show that our algorithm for testing the condition is done in a polynomial-time. Second, we offer an algorithm to construct contained rewritings using the view instances that are computed in the first step. The exponential containment-mapping test in the second step is not needed in our algorithm.