Enhancing Datalog Reasoning with Hypertree Decompositions

Datalog reasoning based on the seminaïve evaluation strategy evaluates rules using traditional join plans, which often leads to redundancy and inefficiency in practice, especially when the rules are complex. Hypertree decompositions help identify efficient query plans and reduce similar redundancy in query answering. However, it is unclear how this can be applied to materialisation and incremental reasoning with recursive Datalog programs. Moreover, hypertree decompositions require additional data structures and thus introduce nonnegligible overhead in both runtime and memory consumption. In this paper, we provide algorithms that exploit hypertree decompositions for the materialisation and incremental evaluation of Datalog programs. Furthermore, we combine this approach with standard Datalog reasoning algorithms in a modular fashion so that the overhead caused by the decompositions is reduced. Our empirical evaluation shows that, when the program contains complex rules, the combined approach is usually significantly faster than the baseline approach, sometimes by orders of magnitude.