Abstract
We describe the design decisions made for the NAIL! (not another implementation of logic!) system, an advanced form of DBMS where queries may involve a large collection of Prolog-like rules used for query interpretation. A discussion of the ways NAIL! semantics differs from Prolog is followed by an exposition of the principal ideas in the system design. These points include the partition of predicates into strongly connected components to represent the structure of recursions and the “capture rule” organization for selecting query processing strategies. Other ideas include the way distinctions between bound and free arguments are capitalized upon and the persistence of previously discovered facts about the way to handle certain queries. We also survey the recent work on the processing of recursively defined queries conducted by the NAIL! group and others with similar computational models.
Work supported by NSF grant IST-84-12791 and a grant of IBM Corp.
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Morris, K., Ullman, J.D., Van Gelder, A. (1986). Design overview of the NAIL! System. In: Shapiro, E. (eds) Third International Conference on Logic Programming. ICLP 1986. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 225. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-16492-8_104
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-16492-8_104
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