Using Color Refinement to Boost Enumeration and Counting for Acyclic CQs of Binary Schemas

preprint2026arXivOpen access

Abstract

We present an index structure, called the color-index, to boost the evaluation of acyclic conjunctive queries (ACQs) over binary schemas. The color-index is based on the color refinement algorithm, a widely used subroutine for graph isomorphism testing algorithms. Given a database DD, we use a suitable version of the color refinement algorithm to produce a stable coloring of DD, an assignment from the active domain of DD to a set of colors CDC_D. The main ingredient of the color-index is a particular database DcD_c whose active domain is CDC_D and whose size is at most ∣D∣|D|. Using the color-index, we can evaluate any free-connex ACQ QQ over DD with preprocessing time O(∣Q∣⋅∣Dc∣)O(|Q| \cdot |D_c|) and constant delay enumeration. Furthermore, we can also count the number of results of QQ over DD in time O(∣Q∣⋅∣Dc∣)O(|Q| \cdot |D_c|). Given that ∣Dc∣|D_c| could be much smaller than ∣D∣|D| (even constant-size for some families of databases), the color-index is the first index structure for evaluating free-connex ACQs that allows efficient enumeration and counting with performance that may be strictly smaller than the database size.

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