Datalog is a declarative logic programming language. While it is syntactically a subset of Prolog, Datalog generally uses a bottom-up rather than top-down evaluation model. This difference yields significantly different behavior and properties from Prolog. It is often used as a query language for deductive databases. Datalog has been applied to problems in data integration, networking, program analysis, and more.
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Datalog in the context of Logic programming
Logic programming is a programming, database and knowledge representation paradigm based on formal logic. A logic program is a set of sentences in logical form, representing knowledge about some problem domain. Computation is performed by applying logical reasoning to that knowledge, to solve problems in the domain. Major logic programming language families include Prolog, Answer Set Programming (ASP) and Datalog. In all of these languages, rules are written in the form of clauses:
and are read as declarative sentences in logical form:
View the full Wikipedia page for Logic programmingDatalog in the context of Deductive database
A deductive database is a database system that can make deductions (i.e. conclude additional facts) based on rules and facts stored in its database. Datalog is the language typically used to specify facts, rules and queries in deductive databases. Deductive databases have grown out of the desire to combine logic programming with relational databases to construct systems that support a powerful formalism and are still fast and able to deal with very large datasets. Deductive databases are more expressive than relational databases but less expressive than logic programming systems such as Prolog. In recent years, deductive databases have found new application in data integration, information extraction, networking, program analysis, security, and cloud computing.
Deductive databases reuse many concepts from logic programming; rules and facts specified in Datalog look very similar to those written in Prolog, but there are some important differences:
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