The design of relational databases
The design of relational databases
On the Structure of Armstrong Relations for Functional Dependencies
Journal of the ACM (JACM)
Functional Dependencies and the Semilattice of Closed Classes
MFDBS '89 Proceedings of the 2nd Symposium on Mathematical Fundamentals of Database Systems
Design by example for SQL table definitions with functional dependencies
The VLDB Journal — The International Journal on Very Large Data Bases
Foundations for a fourth normal form over SQL-Like databases
Conceptual Modelling and Its Theoretical Foundations
ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS)
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We will investigate the following question: what can be the maximum number of independent functional dependencies in a database of n attributes, that is the maximum cardinality of a system of dependencies which which do not follow from the Armstrong axioms and none of them can be derived from the remaining ones using the Armstrong axioms. An easy and for long time believed to be the best construction is the following: take the maximum possible number of subsets of the attributes such that none of them contains the other one (by the wellknown theorem of Sperner [8] their number is ($^{~~n}_{n/2}$)) and let them all determine all the further values. However, we will show by a specific construction that it is possible to give more than ($^{~~n}_{n/2}$) independent dependencies (the construction will give (1 + $\frac{1}{n^2}$) ($^{~~n}_{n/2}$) of them) and — on the other hand — the upper bound is 2n–1, which is roughly $\sqrt{n}(^{~~n}_{n/2})$.