The concept of constraint databases (CDB) was initiated by Kanellakis, Kupper, and Revesz in 1990 [KKR95], and the CQA/CDB system developed at the University of Connecticut is one of the implementations. The main goal of the CDB approach is to provide the functionality to represent and manipulate infinite relations, which is not present in the relational databases. Infinite relations in the context of the CQA/CDB system pertain to spatio temporal data (moving objects) and field-based data (elevation data). The CQA/CDB system represents infinite spatiotemporal points by finite number of linear constraints, and the traditional notion of tuples is generalized to that of constraint tuple. Both traditional data (such as "student name") and the constraints may be incorporated in a constraint tuple. The Constraint Query Algebra (CQA) [GK96] provides a uniform manipulation of both types of data. This feature is a critical advantage over current Geographic Information Systems (GIS), which does not have integration of spatiotempral and the traditional data. Furthermore, the CQA may provides a query language that is easier to use and has the potential for optimizations, using extensions of standard relational query evaluation techniques.
In this user manual, we first introduce the principal terminology used in the CQA/CDB system. Next, the user interface is presented by a discussion on the major GUI components. The steps to create relations and queries are summarized. Query demos on both traditional and spatiotemporal data are presented.