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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 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.
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.
Queries made against the relational database, and the derived relvars in the database are expressed in a relational calculus or a relational algebra. In his original relational algebra, Codd introduced eight relational operators in two groups of four operators each. The first four operators were based on the traditional mathematical set operations:
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.
In relational algebra, a projection is a unary operation written as ,..., (), where is a relation and ,..., are attribute names. Its result is defined as the set obtained when the components of the tuples in are restricted to the set {,...,} – it discards (or excludes) the other attributes.
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.
Conjunctive queries without distinguished variables are called boolean conjunctive queries.Conjunctive queries where all variables are distinguished (and no variables are bound) are called equi-join queries, [1] because they are the equivalent, in the relational calculus, of the equi-join queries in the relational algebra (when selecting all columns of the result).