Stop the Chase: Short Contribution

The chase procedure, an algorithm proposed 25+ years ago to fix constraint violations in database instances, has been successfully applied in a variety of contexts, such as query optimization and data exchange. Its practicability, however, is limited by the fact that – for an arbitrary set of constraints – it might not terminate; even worse, chase termination is an undecidable problem in general. In response, the database community has proposed sufficient restrictions on top of the constraints that guarantee chase termination on any database instance. In this paper, we propose a sufficient termination condition, called inductive restriction, which strictly generalizes previous conditions, but can be checked as efficiently.