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A relation is thus a heading paired with a body, the heading of the relation being also the heading of each tuple in its body. The number of attributes constituting a heading is called the degree, which term also applies to tuples and relations. The term n-tuple refers to a tuple of degree n (n ≥ 0). E. F. Codd used the term "relation" in its ...
(t.name = "Codd") — tuple t has a name attribute and its value is "Codd" Book(t) — tuple t is present in relation Book. The formal semantics of such atoms is defined given a database db over S and a tuple variable binding val : V → T D that maps tuple variables to tuples over the domain in S: v.a = w.b is true if and only if val(v)(a ...
However, unlike rows and columns in a table, a relation's attributes and tuples are unordered. A relation consists of a heading and a body. The heading defines a set of attributes, each with a name and data type (sometimes called a domain). The number of attributes in this set is the relation's degree or arity. The body is a set of tuples.
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.
The above concept of relation [a] has been generalized to admit relations between members of two different sets (heterogeneous relation, like "lies on" between the set of all points and that of all lines in geometry), relations between three or more sets (finitary relation, like "person x lives in town y at time z "), and relations between ...
Constraints can apply to single attributes, to a tuple (restricting combinations of attributes) or to an entire relation. Since every attribute has an associated domain, there are constraints (domain constraints). The two principal rules for the relational model are known as entity integrity and referential integrity.
The consequence is that each value in the tuple must be of some basic type, like a string or an integer. For the elementary type to be atomic it cannot be broken into more pieces. Alas, the domain is an elementary type, and attribute domain the domain a given attribute belongs to an abstraction belonging to or characteristic of an entity.
The relational algebra and the domain-independent relational calculus are logically equivalent: for any algebraic expression, there is an equivalent expression in the calculus, and vice versa. This result is known as Codd's theorem.