Materialization and incremental update of path information

The problem of efficiently processing recursive path queries in deductive database systems is discussed, and a semimaterialized encoding structure is proposed as an attractive approach that provides a balance between efficiency of retrieval and feasibility of storage. Incremental algorithms are presented that enable the effects of updates to the underlying database to be reflected in the materialized information. Performance simulations indicate that these techniques can significantly speed up the processing of path queries at an acceptable level of storage overhead