Counting solutions to conjunctive queries: Structural and hybrid tractability

Counting the number of answers to conjunctive queries is an intractable problem, formally #P-hard, even over classes of acyclic queries. However, Durand and Mengel have recently introduced the notion of quantified star size that, combined with hypertree decompositions, identifies islands of tractability for the problem. They also wonder whether such a notion precisely characterizes those classes for which the counting problem is tractable. We show that this is the case only for bounded-arity simple queries, where relation symbols cannot be shared by different query atoms. Indeed, we give a negative answer to the question in the general case, by exhibiting a more powerful structural method based on the novel concept of #-generalized hy-pertree decomposition. On classes of queries with bounded #-generalized hypertree width, counting answers is shown to be feasible in polynomial time, after a fixed-parameter polynomial-time preprocessing that only depends on the query structure. A weaker variant (but still more general than the technique based on the quantified starsize) is also proposed, for which tractability is established without any exponential dependency on the query size. Based on #-generalized hypertree decompositions, a "hybrid" decomposition method is eventually conceived, where structural properties of the query are exploited in combination with properties of the given database, such as keys or other (weaker) dependencies among attributes that limit the allowed combinations of values. Intuitively, such features may induce different structural properties that are not identified by the "worst-possible database" perspective of purely structural methods.