Integrating constraint and relational database systems

Constraint databases are a generalization of relational databases and can finitely represent infinite relations. The high expressiveness of constraint databases makes them a promising data model for representing spatial and spatiotemporal information. On the other hand, relational database systems are predominantly used for traditional applications and have a proven record of providing efficient querying and management of business data. It is more cost-effective to integrate constraint databases with the existing relational database systems than to build a completely new constraint database system from scratch. This paper proposes a way to integrate the constraint data model and query languages with a relational database system. It introduces a new relational data type to represent constraint data. It also provides several new relational database operators to query the constraint data.