We consider the problem of determining whether organiza-tions facing a new data-transformation task can avoid building a new transformation procedure from scratch by reusing their stored proce-dures. Because it can be difficult to obtain exact descriptions of what stored procedures do, our framework abstracts data-transforming tools as black-box procedures, in which a procedure description indicates the parts of the database that might be modified by the procedure and con-straints on the states of the database that must hold before and after the application of this procedure.
In this paper we present our framework and study the problem of de-termining, given a database and a set of procedures, whether there is a sequence of procedures from this set such that their application to the database results in the satisfaction of a boolean query. This data readi-ness problem is undecidable in general, but we show decidability for a broad and realistic class of procedures.

The Data Readiness Problem for Relational Databases​