An Investigation Of Cyclic Rule Behavior In Integrity Maintenance Rules

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This research investigates the automated, static analysis of integrity maintenance rules within an active database environment. An integrity maintenance rule is a rule that attempts to "resatisfy" a constraint by initiating corrective, state-altering database operations. Rules that attempt to maintain conflicting or ill-specified constraints, however, can lead to cyclic and anomalous rule behavior. This research addresses the theoretical aspects and implementation details of a system for reasoning about the interaction between integrity maintenance rules for the purpose of automatically identifying provably safe, provably inconsistent, and potentially inconsistent rule behaviors. The investigation is performed in a deductive, object-oriented framework, using object logics to provide a well-defined syntax and semantics. The analysis of rule behavior is based on current research on constraint satisfiability and integrity checking in deductive databases, using the truth maintenance paradigm to support user interaction in and explanation of the rule analysis process. The analysis process includes rules triggered by a set of transaction operations. An important contribution of the research is the framework it provides for the correct execution of integrity maintenance rules in an active, object-oriented environment and for further refinement of execution models and run-time monitoring of active database rules, in general.