  In the last decade, the term instance-spanning constraint has been introduced
in the process mining field to refer to constraints that span multiple process
instances of one or several processes. Of particular relevance, in this
setting, is checking whether process executions comply with constraints of
interest, which at runtime calls for suitable monitoring techniques. Even
though event data are often stored in some sort of database, there is a lack of
database-oriented approaches to tackle compliance checking and monitoring of
(instance-spanning) constraints. In this paper, we fill this gap by showing how
well-established technology from database query processing can be effectively
used for this purpose. We propose to define an instance-spanning constraint
through an ensemble of four database queries that retrieve the satisfying,
violating, pending-satisfying, and pending-violating cases of the constraint.
In this context, the problem of compliance monitoring then becomes an
application of techniques for incremental view maintenance, which is
well-developed in database query processing. In this paper, we argue for our
approach in detail, and, as a proof of concept, present an experimental
validation using the DBToaster incremental database query engine.
