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If a relational schema is in BCNF, then all redundancy based on functional dependency has been removed, [4] although other types of redundancy may still exist. A relational schema R is in Boyce–Codd normal form if and only if for every one of its functional dependencies X → Y, at least one of the following conditions hold: [5]
In database theory, a relation, as originally defined by E. F. Codd, [1] is a set of tuples (d 1,d 2,...,d n), where each element d j is a member of D j, a data domain. Codd's original definition notwithstanding, and contrary to the usual definition in mathematics, there is no ordering to the elements of the tuples of a relation.
An example of such a forbidden query is the query "select all tuples other than those occurring in relation R", where R is a relation in the database. Assuming different domains, i.e., sets of atomic data items from which tuples can be constructed, this query returns different results and thus is clearly not domain independent.
The subset of C for which a tuple t is defined is called the domain of t (not to be confused with the domain in the schema) and denoted as dom(t). Finally we define a relational database given a schema S = (D, R, h) as a function db : R → 2 T D. that maps the relation names in R to finite subsets of T D, such that for every relation name r in ...
For example, in the Order relation the attribute Customer ID is a foreign key. A join is the operation that draws on information from several relations at once. By joining relvars from the example above we could query the database for all of the Customers, Orders, and Invoices.
The relational algebra uses set union, set difference, and Cartesian product from set theory, and adds additional constraints to these operators to create new ones.. For set union and set difference, the two relations involved must be union-compatible—that is, the two relations must have the same set of attributes.
An alternate representation of the previous example would be: { , ,, , ′ ′, } In this example, the value of the requested F domain is directly placed in the formula and the C domain variable is re-used in the query for the existence of a department, since it already holds a crew member's ID.
A relation is in first normal form if and only if no attribute domain has relations as elements. [1] Or more informally, that no table column can have tables as values. Database normalization is the process of representing a database in terms of relations in standard normal forms, where first normal is a minimal requirement.