A Chase-based Approach to Consistent Answers of Analytic Queries in Star Schemas

Abstract

We present an approach to computing consistent answers to queries possibly involving an aggregation operator in databases operating under a star schema and possibly containing missing values and inconsistent data. Our approach is based on earlier work concerning consistent query answering for standard queries (with no aggregate operator) in multi-table databases. In that work, we presented polynomial algorithms for computing either the exact consistent answer to a query or bounds of the exact answer, depending on whether the query involves a selection condition or not. In the present work, we consider databases operating under a star schema. Calling data warehouses such databases, we extend our previous work to queries involving aggregate operators, called analytic queries. In this context, we propose specific algorithms for computing exact consistent answers to queries, whether analytic or not, provided that the selection condition in the query satisfies the property of independency (i.e., the condition can be expressed as a conjunction of conditions each involving a single attribute). We show that the overall time complexity of these specific algorithms is in O(W.log(W)), where W is the size of the data warehouse. Moreover, the case of analytic queries involving a having clause associated with a group-by clause is discussed in the context of our approach.