Provenance for Large-scale Datalog

Abstract

Logic programming languages such as Datalog have become popular as Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) for solving large-scale, real-world problems, in particular, static program analysis and network analysis. The logic specifications which model analysis problems, process millions of tuples of data and contain hundreds of highly recursive rules. As a result, they are notoriously difficult to debug. While the database community has proposed several data-provenance techniques that address the Declarative Debugging Challenge for Databases, in the cases of analysis problems, these state-of-the-art techniques do not scale. In this paper, we introduce a novel bottom-up Datalog evaluation strategy for debugging: our provenance evaluation strategy relies on a new provenance lattice that includes proof annotations, and a new fixed-point semantics for semi-naive evaluation. A debugging query mechanism allows arbitrary provenance queries, constructing partial proof trees of tuples with minimal height. We integrate our technique into Souffle, a Datalog engine that synthesizes C++ code, and achieve high performance by using specialized parallel data structures. Experiments are conducted with DOOP/DaCapo, producing proof annotations for tens of millions of output tuples. We show that our method has a runtime overhead of 1.27x on average while being more flexible than existing state-of-the-art techniques.