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In SQL (Structured Query Language), the term cardinality refers to the uniqueness of data values contained in a particular column (attribute) of a database table. The lower the cardinality, the more duplicated elements in a column. Thus, a column with the lowest possible cardinality would have the same value for every row.
In relational database management systems, a unique key is a candidate key. All the candidate keys of a relation can uniquely identify the records of the relation ...
Queries allow the user to describe desired data, leaving the database management system (DBMS) to carry out planning, optimizing, and performing the physical operations necessary to produce that result as it chooses. A query includes a list of columns to include in the final result, normally immediately following the SELECT keyword.
The database translates the query into a "query plan" which may vary between executions, database versions and database software. This functionality is called the "query optimizer" as it is responsible for finding the best possible execution plan for the query, within applicable constraints. The SELECT statement has many optional clauses:
The null End_Date in row two indicates the current tuple version. A standardized surrogate high date (e.g. 9999-12-31) may instead be used as an end date so that null-value substitution is not required when querying. In some database software, using an artificial high date value could cause performance issues, that using a null value would prevent.
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.
The advantages of using a natural key to uniquely identify records in a relation include less disk space usage, the natural key is an attribute that is related to the business or the real world so in most cases, it is already being stored in the relation which saves disk space as compared to creating a new column for storing the surrogate key.
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 ...