Expressiveness and static analysis of extended conjunctive regular path queries
We study the expressiveness and the complexity of static analysis of extended conjunctive regular path queries (ECRPQs), introduced by Barcelo et al. (2010) [3]. ECRPQs are an extension of conjunctive regular path queries (CRPQs), a well-studied language for querying graph structured databases. Our first main result shows that query containment and equivalence of a CRPQ in an ECRPQ are undecidable. This settles one of the main open problems posed by Barcelo et al. As a second main result, we prove a non-recursive succinctness gap between CRPQs and the CRPQ-expressible fragment of ECRPQs. Apart from this, we develop a tool for proving inexpressibility results for CRPQs and ECRPQs. In particular, this enables us to show that there exist queries definable by regular expressions with backreferencing, but not expressible by ECRPQs. (C) 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
regular path queries query containment graph databases conjunctive queries regular relations