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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.
A relation algebra (L, ∧, ∨, −, 0, 1, •, I, ˘) is an algebraic structure equipped with the Boolean operations of conjunction x∧y, disjunction x∨y, and negation x −, the Boolean constants 0 and 1, the relational operations of composition x•y and converse x˘, and the relational constant I, such that these operations and constants satisfy certain equations constituting an ...
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.
The nested set model is a technique for representing nested set collections (also known as trees or hierarchies) in relational databases.. It is based on Nested Intervals, that "are immune to hierarchy reorganization problem, and allow answering ancestor path hierarchical queries algorithmically — without accessing the stored hierarchy relation".
Another form of composition of relations, which applies to general -place relations for , is the join operation of relational algebra. The usual composition of two binary relations as defined here can be obtained by taking their join, leading to a ternary relation, followed by a projection that removes the middle component.
In relational algebra, a selection (sometimes called a restriction in reference to E.F. Codd's 1970 paper [1] and not, contrary to a popular belief, to avoid confusion with SQL's use of SELECT, since Codd's article predates the existence of SQL) is a unary operation that denotes a subset of a relation.
[1] In practical terms, if a relation is thought of as a table, then projection can be thought of as picking a subset of its columns. For example, if the attributes are (name, age), then projection of the relation {(Alice, 5), (Bob, 8)} onto attribute list (age) yields {5,8} – we have discarded the names, and only know what ages are present.
For example, "1 < 3", "1 is less than 3", and "(1,3) ∈ R less" mean all the same; some authors also write "(1,3) ∈ (<)". Various properties of relations are investigated. A relation R is reflexive if xRx holds for all x, and irreflexive if xRx holds for no x. It is symmetric if xRy always implies yRx, and asymmetric if xRy implies that yRx ...