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Thus, the "relation" in "relational database" refers to the various tables in the database; a relation is a set of tuples. The columns enumerate the various attributes of the entity (the employee's name, address or phone number, for example), and a row is an actual instance of the entity (a specific employee) that is represented by the relation.
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.
One well-known definition of what constitutes a relational database system is composed of Codd's 12 rules. However, no commercial implementations of the relational model conform to all of Codd's rules, [4] so the term has gradually come to describe a broader class of database systems, which at a minimum:
The next definition defines relation that formalizes the contents of a table as it is defined in the relational model. Relation A relation is a tuple (,) with , the header, and , the body, a set of tuples that all have the domain .
Codd's twelve rules [1] are a set of thirteen rules (numbered zero to twelve) proposed by Edgar F. Codd, a pioneer of the relational model for databases, designed to define what is required from a database management system in order for it to be considered relational, i.e., a relational database management system (RDBMS).
In a simple relational database implementation, each row of a table represents one instance of an entity type, and each field in a table represents an attribute type. In a relational database a relationship between entities is implemented by storing the primary key of one entity as a pointer or "foreign key" in the table of another entity.
There is a functional dependency from the candidate key to all the attributes in the relation. The superkeys of a relation are all the possible ways we can identify a row. The candidate keys are the minimal subsets of each superkey and as such, they are an important concept for the design of database schema.
In relational databases, relvar is a term introduced by C. J. Date and Hugh Darwen as an abbreviation for relation variable in their 1995 paper The Third Manifesto, to avoid the confusion sometimes arising from the use of the term "relation", by the inventor of the relational model, E. F. Codd, for a variable to which a relation is assigned as well as for the relation itself.