A unified and practical approach to generalized deletion propagation

Deletion Propagation problems are a family of database problems that have been studied for over 40 years. They are variants of the classical view-update problem where intended tuple deletions in the view (output of a query) are propagated back to the source (input database) in a manner that obeys certain constraints while minimizing side effects. Several problems from this family have been studied and used to solve problems in domains as diverse as GDPR compliance, effective SQL pedagogy, and query explanations. However, so far these variants, their complexity, and practical algorithms have always been studied in isolation. This talk will outline a recent unification in a single unified and generalized framework that comes with several appealing benefits.

(joint work with Neha Makhija)

Project page:
https://northeastern-datalab.github.io/unified-reverse-data-management/