The goal of the ProvSQL project is to add support for (m-)semiring provenance and uncertainty management to PostgreSQL databases, in the form of a PostgreSQL extension/module/plugin. It is work in progress at the moment.
The ProvSQL system currently supports proper management of provenance attached to SQL queries, in the form of a provenance circuit, suitable both for regular Boolean provenance, arbitrary semiring provenance, with or without monus (m-semiring), in the free m-semiring, or specialized to any m-semiring of choice. It also supports where-provenance and probability computation from the provenance, through a variety of methods.
The following SQL queries are currently supported.
- Regular SELECT-FROM-WHERE queries (aka conjunctive queries with multiset semantics)
- JOIN queries (regular joins only; outer, semijoins, and antijoins are not currently supported)
- SELECT queries with nested SELECT subqueries in the FROM clause
- GROUP BY queries (without aggregation)
- SELECT DISTINCT queries (i.e., set semantics)
- UNION's or UNION ALL's of SELECT queries
- EXCEPT of SELECT queries
As an alternative to a ProvSQL installation (see below), you can try
a demonstration version of ProvSQL (full-featured, except for minic2d
support) as a Docker container. To deploy it, once Docker CE is
installed, simply run:
docker run inriavalda/provsqldemo
By following the instructions, you will be able to connect to the PostgreSQL server within the container using a PostgreSQL client, and to use a Web interface for simple visualization of where-provenance.
-
An install of PostgreSQL >= 9.5. The extension has currently been tested with versions from 9.5 to 12.2 (inclusive) of PostgreSQL, under Linux and Mac OS X (if the extension does not work on a specific version or operating system, a bug report is appreciated).
-
A compilation environment for PostgreSQL, including the
make
tool, a C compiler (both can be obtained on Debian-based Linux distributions from the virtualbuild-essential
package), and the headers for your PostgreSQL version (as can be obtained for instance from thepostgresql-server-dev-xx
package on Debian-based systems, or from thepostgresql
package on the Homebrew package manager for Mac OS X). -
Finally, the
uuid-ossp
extension for PostgreSQL (on Debian-based systems, it is found in thepostgresql-contrib-9.x
package for PostgreSQL version 9.x, and is installed automatically for PostgreSQL version >= 10; on Homebrew, in theossp-uuid
package). -
Optionally, for probability computation through knowledge compilation, any or all of the following software:
-
dsharp
, from https://github.com/QuMuLab/dsharp -
minic2d
, from http://reasoning.cs.ucla.edu/minic2d/ -
weightmc
, from https://bitbucket.org/kuldeepmeel/weightmc/src/master/
To be used, an executable with the name of this software must be available in the PATH of the PostgreSQL server user (e.g., in
/usr/local/bin/
). Usingminic2d
also requires thehgr2htree
executable (it is provided withminic2d
). -
Optionally, for circuit visualization, the
graph-easy
executable from the Graph::Easy Perl library (that can be obtained from thelibgraph-easy-perl
package on Debian-based Linux distributions) or from CPAN.
-
Compile the code with
make
. If you have several installed versions of PostgreSQL, you can change the version the module is compiled against by changing the reference topg_config
in the Makefile. -
Install it in the PostgreSQL extensions directory with
make install
(run as a user with rights to write to the PostgreSQL installation directories). -
Add the line
shared_preload_libraries = 'provsql'
to the
postgresql.conf
configuration file (on Linux systems, it should be in/etc/postgresql/VERSION/main/postgresql.conf
) and restart the PostgreSQL server (e.g., withservice postgresql restart
on systemd-based distributions). This is required because the extension includes hooks.
You can test your installation by running make installcheck
as a
PostgreSQL administrator user. If you do not want to run this as the
default administrator user, you can make yourself a PostgreSQL
administrator with ALTER USER your_login WITH SUPERUSER
. This assumes that
your_login
is a PostgreSQL user: on Debian-based Linux distributions, you
can ensure this by running the command createuser your_login
as the
postgres
user.
Note that the tests that depend on external software (c2d
, d4
,
dsharp
, minic2d
, weightmc
, graph-easy
) will fail if no executable of
that name can be found.
You can use ProvSQL in any PostgreSQL database by loading the
provsql
extension. See the file setup.sql
for an example on how to do this.
You then need to add provenance to an existing table using the
provsql.add_provenance(regclass)
user-defined function.
See add_provenance.sql for an example.
The table will have an extra provsql
column added. This column
is handled in a special way and always represents, in query results, the
provenance of each tuple as a UUID.
You can then use this provenance to run computation in various semirings. See security.sql and formula.sql for two examples.
See the other examples in test/sql for other use cases.
A demonstration of the ProvSQL system is available as a video, on https://youtu.be/iqzSNfGHbEE?vq=hd1080 The SQL commands used in this demonstration can be found in the doc/demo/ directory. An article describing this demonstration, presented at the VLDB 2018. conference, is available at http://pierre.senellart.com/publications/senellart2018provsql.pdf
Finally, a ProvSQL tutorial is provided, in the form of a crime mystery. It can be found in the doc/tutorial/ directory.
You can uninstall ProvSQL by running make uninstall
(run as a user with
rights to write to the PostgreSQL installation directories), and by removing the
reference to provsql
in the postgresql.conf
configuration file.
ProvSQL is provided as open-source software under the MIT License. See LICENSE.
https://github.com/PierreSenellart/provsql
Pierre Senellart pierre@senellart.com
Bug reports and feature requests are preferably sent through the Issues feature of GitHub.