Space-Time Tradeoffs for Conjunctive Queries with Access Patterns

In this article, we investigate space-time tradeoffs for answering conjunctive queries with access patterns (CQAPs). The goal is to create a space-efficient data structure in an initial preprocessing phase and use it for answering (multiple) queries in an online phase. Previous work has developed data structures that trades off space usage for answering time for queries of practical interest, such as the path and triangle query. However, these approaches lack a comprehensive framework and are not generalizable. Our main contribution is a general algorithmic framework for obtaining space-time tradeoffs for any CQAP. Our framework builds upon the PANDA algorithm and tree decomposition techniques. We demonstrate that our framework captures all state-of-the-art tradeoffs that were independently produced for various queries. Furthermore, we show surprising improvements over the state-of-the-art tradeoffs known in the existing literature for reachability queries.