Entropy bounds for conjunctive queries with functional dependencies

Abstract: We study the problem of finding the worst-case bound for the size of the result $Q(\mathbb{ D})$ of a fixed conjunctive query $Q$ applied to a database $\mathbb{ D}$ satisfying given functional dependencies. We provide a precise characterization of this bound in terms of entropy vectors, and in terms of finite groups. In particular, we show that an upper bound provided by Gottlob, Lee, Valiant and Valiant is tight, answering a question from their paper. Our result generalizes the bound due to Atserias, Grohe and Marx, who consider the case without functional dependencies. Our result shows that the problem of computing the worst-case size bound, in the general case, is closely related to difficult problems from information theory.