A Unifying Semantics for Active Databases Using Non-Markovian Theories of Actions

Over the last fifteen years, database management systems (DBMSs) have been enhanced by the addition of rule-based programming to obtain active DBMSs. One of the greatest challenges in this area is to formally account for all the aspects of active behavior using a uniform formalism. In this paper, we formalize active relational databases within the framework of the situation calculus by uniformly accounting for them using theories embodying non-Markovian control in the situation calculus. We call these theories active relational theories and use them to capture the dynamics of active databases. Transaction processing and rule execution is modelled as a theorem proving task using active relational theories as background axioms. We show that major components of an ADBMS may be given a clear semantics using active relational theories.