The complexity of acyclic conjunctive queries

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Abstract
This paper deals with the evaluation of acyclic Boolean conjunctive queries in relational databases. By well-known results of Yannakakis[1981], this problem is solvable in polynomial time; its precise complexity, however, has not been pinpointed so far. We show that the problem of evaluating acyclic Boolean conjunctive queries is complete for LOGCFL, the class of decision problems that are logspace-reducible to a context-free language. Since LOGCFL is contained in AC1 and NC2, the evaluation problem of acyclic Boolean conjunctive queries is highly parallelizable. We present a parallel database algorithm solving this problem with alogarithmic number of parallel join operations. The algorithm is generalized to computing the output of relevant classes of non-Boolean queries. We also show that the acyclic versions of the following well-known database and AI problems are all LOGCFL-complete: The Query Output Tuple problem for conjunctive queries, Conjunctive Query Containment, Clause Subsumption, and Constraint Satisfaction. The LOGCFL-completeness result is extended to the class of queries of bounded tree width and to other relevant query classes which are more general than the acyclic queries.

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