Thread: Conditional Tables in Postgres

Conditional Tables in Postgres

From
Mubashir Anwar
Date:

Hi!

I am a PhD student, researching on using databases to implement network control infrastructure. For this purpose, I wanted to use conditional tables in databases, which allow representing unknown values in a DB with conditions over tuples. However, I could not find any DBMS that supports them. Are there any postgres extensions/features that implement conditional tables? I wanted to confirm by asking here in case I missed something in my search.

Thanks in advance!

Best,
Mubashir

Re: Conditional Tables in Postgres

From
Imre Samu
Date:
Hi Mubashir,

>  ... researching on using databases to implement network control infrastructure.  ... 
>  Are there any postgres extensions/features that implement conditional tables

like this?

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3472716.3472848  "Sarasate: a strong representation system for networking policies"
"Policy information in computer networking today is hard to manage. This is in sharp contrast to relational data structured in a database that allows easy access. In this demonstration, we ask why cannot (or how can) turn network policies into relational data. Our key observation is that oftentimes a policy does not prescribe a single ``definite'' network state, but rather is an ``incomplete'' description of all the legitimate network states. Based on this idea, we adopt conditional tables and the usual SQL interface (a relational structure developed for incomplete database) as a means to represent and query sets of network states in exactly the same way as a single definite network snapshot. More importantly, like relational tables that improve data productivity and innovation, relational policies allow us to extend a rich set of data mediating methods to address the networking problem of coordinating policies in a distributed environment."

   And it is a [ PL/python3u extension  + Z3-solver (Z3 API in Python) ] solution.
Probably easy to reimplement in

IMHO: if you have a favorite Python/R/Julia library in this topic - you can easily integrate it with PostgreSQL.

Regards,
  Imre


Mubashir Anwar <mubashir.anwar1998@gmail.com> ezt írta (időpont: 2021. okt. 14., Cs, 21:41):

Hi!

I am a PhD student, researching on using databases to implement network control infrastructure. For this purpose, I wanted to use conditional tables in databases, which allow representing unknown values in a DB with conditions over tuples. However, I could not find any DBMS that supports them. Are there any postgres extensions/features that implement conditional tables? I wanted to confirm by asking here in case I missed something in my search.

Thanks in advance!

Best,
Mubashir