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A requirement of E. F. Codd in his seminal paper is that a primary key of an entity, or any part of it, can never take a null value. [1] The relational model states that every relation (or table ) must have an identifier, called the primary key (abbreviated PK), in such a way that every row of the same relation be identifiable by its content ...
For referential integrity to hold in a relational database, any column in a base table that is declared a foreign key can only contain either null values or values from a parent table's primary key or a candidate key. [2] In other words, when a foreign key value is used it must reference a valid, existing primary key in the parent table. For ...
Index data are system data distinct from user data, and consist primarily of pointers. Changes in a database (by insert, delete, or modify operations), may require indexes to be updated to maintain accurate user data accesses. [1] Index locking is a technique used to maintain index integrity. A portion of an index is locked during a database ...
This may improve the joins of these tables on the cluster key, since the matching records are stored together and less I/O is required to locate them. [2] The cluster configuration defines the data layout in the tables that are parts of the cluster. A cluster can be keyed with a B-tree index or a hash table. The data block where the table ...
A foreign key is a set of attributes in a table that refers to the primary key of another table, linking these two tables. In the context of relational databases, a foreign key is subject to an inclusion dependency constraint that the tuples consisting of the foreign key attributes in one relation, R, must also exist in some other (not necessarily distinct) relation, S; furthermore that those ...
The syntax of the SQL programming language is defined and maintained by ISO/IEC SC 32 as part of ISO/IEC 9075.This standard is not freely available. Despite the existence of the standard, SQL code is not completely portable among different database systems without adjustments.
Domain-key normal form (DK/NF or DKNF) is a normal form used in database normalization which requires that the database contains no constraints other than domain constraints and key constraints. A domain constraint specifies the permissible values for a given attribute, while a key constraint specifies the attributes that uniquely identify a ...
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.