Extending Datalog with Declarative Updates

The semantics of static deductive databases is well understood based on the work in logic programming. In the past decade, various methods to incorporate update constructs into logic programming and deductive databases have been proposed. However, there is still no consensus about the appropriate treatment of dynamic behavior in deductive databases. In this paper, we propose a language called DatalogU, which is a minimal but powerful extension of Datalog with updates to base relations. DatalogU allows the user to program set-oriented complex database transactions with concurrent, disjunctive and sequential update operations in a simple and direct way. It has a simple and intuitive declarative semantics that naturally accounts for set-oriented updates in deductive databases.