Causes for query answers from databases: Datalog abduction, view-updates, and integrity constraints

Causality has been recently introduced in databases, to model, characterize, and possibly compute causes for query answers. Connections between QA-causality and consistency based diagnosis and database repairs (wrt, integrity constraint violations) have already been established. In this work we establish precise connections between QA-causality and both abductive diagnosis and the view-update problem in databases, allowing us to obtain new algorithmic and complexity results for QA-causality. We also obtain new results on the complexity of view-conditioned causality, and investigate the notion of QA-causality in the presence of integrity constraints, obtaining complexity results from a connection with view-conditioned causality. The abduction connection under integrity constraints allows us to obtain algorithmic tools for QA-causality. (C) 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.