Formulating View Update Translation as Constraint Satisfaction

View update is the problem of translating update requests against a view into update requests against the base data. Previous approaches to view update translation have been mainly focused on studying the conditions under which an exact, unique translation of a view update request exists. The conditions are satissed only by a small class of view updates. The approaches to enumerating possible translations are essentially procedural, in the sense that problem formalization and problem solving are not separated. A slight change of a problem speciication would render the algorithms inapplicable. In this paper, we present a declarative approach to the view update problem. Using conditional tables to represent views, we transform a view update problem into constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs). Solutions to the CSPs correspond to possible translations of the view update. This approach enables us to make use of the rich results of the CSP research to analyze and solve view update problems.