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Relational databases store tabular data represented as relations. Queries over relational databases often likewise return tabular data represented as relations. The main purpose of relational algebra is to define operators that transform one or more input relations to an output relation. Given that these operators accept relations as input and ...
Whereas relational databases use a relational calculus or relational algebra, with relational operations, such as union, intersection, set difference and cartesian product to specify queries, Datalog uses logical connectives, such as if, or, and and not to define relations as part of the database itself.
A view can be defined by an expression using the operators of the relational algebra or the relational calculus. Such an expression operates on one or more relations and when evaluated yields another relation. The result is sometimes referred to as a "derived" relation when the operands are relations assigned to database variables.
A join clause in the Structured Query Language combines columns from one or more tables into a new table. The operation corresponds to a join operation in relational algebra. Informally, a join stitches two tables and puts on the same row records with matching fields : INNER, LEFT OUTER, RIGHT OUTER, FULL OUTER and CROSS.
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.
Many first-order queries can be written as conjunctive queries. In particular, a large part of queries issued on relational databases can be expressed in this way. Conjunctive queries also have a number of desirable theoretical properties that larger classes of queries (e.g., the relational algebra queries) do not share.
The basic data structure of the relational model is the table, where information about a particular entity (say, an employee) is represented in rows (also called tuples) and columns. 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 ...
SELECT list is the list of columns or SQL expressions to be returned by the query. This is approximately the relational algebra projection operation. AS optionally provides an alias for each column or expression in the SELECT list. This is the relational algebra rename operation. FROM specifies from which table to get the data. [3]