Deductive Databases and Logic Programming
Deductive databases reuse a large number of concepts from logic programming; rules and facts specified in the deductive database language Datalog look very similar to those in Prolog. However, there are a number of important differences between deductive databases and logic programming:
- Order sensitivity and procedurality: In Prolog, program execution depends on the order of rules in the program and on the order of parts of rules; these properties are used by programmers to build efficient programs. In database languages (like SQL or Datalog), however, program execution is independent of the order of rules and facts.
- Special predicates: In Prolog, programmers can directly influence the procedural evaluation of the program with special predicates such as the cut, this has no correspondence in deductive databases.
- Function symbols: Logic Programming languages allow function symbols to build up complex symbols. This is not allowed in deductive databases.
- Tuple-oriented processing: Deductive databases use set-oriented processing while logic programming languages concentrate on one tuple at a time.
Read more about this topic: Deductive Database
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