Levene, Mark and Vincent, Millist W. (2000) Justification for inclusion dependency normal form. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering 12 (2), pp. 281-291. ISSN 1041-4347.
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Abstract
Functional dependencies (FDs) and inclusion dependencies (INDs) are the most fundamental integrity constraints that arise in practice in relational databases. In this paper, we address the issue of normalization in the presence of FDs and INDs and, in particular, the semantic justification for Inclusion Dependency Normal Form (IDNF), a normal form which combines Boyce-Codd normal form with the restriction on the INDs that they be noncircular and key-based. We motivate and formalize three goals of database design in the presence of FDs and INDs: noninteraction between FDs and INDs, elimination of redundancy and update anomalies, and preservation of entity integrity. We show that, as for FDs, in the presence of INDs being free of redundancy is equivalent to being free of update anomalies. Then, for each of these properties, we derive equivalent syntactic conditions on the database design. Individually, each of these syntactic conditions is weaker than IDNF and the restriction that an FD not be embedded in the righthand side of an IND is common to three of the conditions. However, we also show that, for these three goals of database design to be satisfied simultaneously, IDNF is both a necessary and sufficient condition.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Additional Information: | This is an exact copy of a paper published in IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (ISSN 1041-4347). It is reproduced with permission from the publisher. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE. © 2000 IEEE. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons downloading this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by copyright. This document or any part thereof may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder. Mark Levene was at University College London when this article was published. He is now Professor of Computer Science at Birkbeck College. |
| Keyword(s) / Subject(s): | Relational database design, normal forms, functional dependency, inclusion dependency |
| School: | Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Science > School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences |
| Research Centres and Institutes: | Birkbeck Knowledge Lab |
| Depositing User: | Administrator |
| Date Deposited: | 10 Aug 2005 |
| Last Modified: | 09 Aug 2023 12:28 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/196 |
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