Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Conjunctive queries without distinguished variables are called boolean conjunctive queries.Conjunctive queries where all variables are distinguished (and no variables are bound) are called equi-join queries, [1] because they are the equivalent, in the relational calculus, of the equi-join queries in the relational algebra (when selecting all columns of the result).
For a relational signature X, FO[PFP](X) is the set of formulas formed from X using first-order connectives and predicates, second-order variables as well as a partial fixed point operator used to form formulas of the form [, ], where is a second-order variable, a tuple of first-order variables, a tuple of terms and the lengths of and coincide with the arity of .
An interesting property of these queries is that if we assume that the tuple variables range over tuples over the so-called active domain of the database, which is the subset of the domain that occurs in at least one tuple in the database or in the query expression, then the semantics of the query expressions does not change. In fact, in many ...
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.
Query optimization consists in determining from a query the most efficient manner (or manners) to execute it. Query optimization can be formalized as translating a relational calculus expression delivering an answer A into efficient relational algebraic expressions delivering the same answer A.
The output of the problem is the set of answers to the query on the database. If the queries are Boolean queries, i.e., queries have a yes or no answer (for example, Boolean conjunctive queries) then the query evaluation problem is a decision problem. The query evaluation problem is usually posed for a specific class of queries and databases.
Codd's theorem states that relational algebra and the domain-independent relational calculus queries, two well-known foundational query languages for the relational model, are precisely equivalent in expressive power. That is, a database query can be formulated in one language if and only if it can be expressed in the other.
Queries can be nested so that the results of one query can be used in another query via a relational operator or aggregation function. A nested query is also known as a subquery. While joins and other table operations provide computationally superior (i.e. faster) alternatives in many cases, the use of subqueries introduces a hierarchy in ...