Book Description:
The use of logic in databases started in the late 1960s. In the
early 1970s Codd formalized databases in terms of the relational
calculus and the relational algebra. A major influence on the use of
logic in databases was the development of the field of logic
programming. Logic provides a convenient formalism for studying
classical database problems and has the important property of being
declarative, that is, it allows one to express what she wants rather
than how to get it. For a long time, relational calculus and algebra
were considered the relational database languages. However, there are
simple operations, such as computing the transitive closure of a graph,
which cannot be expressed with these languages. Datalog is a declarative
query language for relational databases based on the logic programming
paradigm. One of the peculiarities that distinguishes Datalog from query
languages like relational algebra and calculus is recursion, which
gives Datalog the capability to express queries like computing a graph
transitive closure. Recent years have witnessed a revival of interest in
Datalog in a variety of emerging application domains such as data
integration, information extraction, networking, program analysis,
security, cloud computing, ontology reasoning, and many others. The aim
of this book is to present the basics of Datalog, some of its
extensions, and recent applications to different domains.
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