A New Finitely Controllable Class of Tuple Generating Dependencies: The Triangularly-Guarded Class

Abstract

In this paper we introduce a new class of tuple-generating dependencies (TGDs) called triangularly-guarded (TG) TGDs. We show that conjunctive query answering under this new class of TGDs is decidable since this new class of TGDs also satisfies the finite controllability (FC) property. We further show that this new class strictly contains some other decidable classes such as weak-acyclic, guarded, sticky and shy. In this sense, the class TG provides a unified representation of all these aforementioned classes of TGDs.