A New Algorithm to Detect the Non-Termination of Triggers in Active Databases

Active Databases are a combination of traditional static databases and active rules, meant to be automated mechanisms to maintain integrity and facilitate in providing database functionalities. Active database systems can react to the occurrence of some predefined events automatically. In many applications, active rules or triggers may interact in complex and sometimes unpredictable ways, thus possibly yielding infinite rule executions by triggering each other indefinitely causing nontermination. The termination of active rules is an unpredictable problem, except when rule languages with very limited number of rules are used. This paper presents new algorithms for detecting termination / non-termination of rule execution using triggering graph and complex triggering graph, and these algorithms do not pose any limitation on the number of rules.