On the computation of relational view complements

Abstract

Views as a means to describe parts of a given data collection play an important role in many database applications. In dynamic environments where data is updated, not only information provided by views, but also information provided by data sources yet missing from views turns out to be relevant: Previously, this missing information has been characterized in terms of view complements ; recently, it has been shown that view complements can be exploited in the context of data warehouses to guarantee desirable warehouse properties such as independence and self-maintainability. As the complete source information is a trivial complement for any view, a natural interest for "small" or even "minimal" complements arises. However, the computation of minimal complements is still not very well understood. In this article, it is shown how to compute reasonably small (and in special cases even minimal) complements for a large class of relational views.