Detecting Termination of Active Database Rules Using Symbolic Model Checking

Many algorithms have been proposed that detect non-termination of active database rules. However, most of these provide a conservative estimate–they detect all potential cases of non-termination. The onus is on the database programmers to further analyze these cases and give more definite results about non-termination. In this paper we show how the database programmer can automatically detect non-termination using an existing symbolic model checker. Our approach does not require much expertise on the part of the database programmer, and can be used to detect termination cases which the conservative approaches reject as non-terminating ones.