Decomposition of relational schemata into components defined by both projection and restriction

• Authors: Stephen J. Hegner
• Venue: Proceedings of the seventh ACM SIGACT-SIGMOD-SIGART symposium on Principles of database systems
• Year: 1988

A generalized approach to the decomposition of relational schemata is developed in which the component views may be defined using both restriction and projection operators, thus admitting both horizontal and vertical decompositions. The realization of restrictions is enabled through the use of a Boolean algebra of types, while true independence of projections is modelled by permitting null values in the base schema. The flavor of the approach is algebraic, with the collection of all candidate views of a decomposition modelled within a lattice-like framework, and the actual decompositions arising as Boolean subalgebrac. Central to the framework is the notion of sidimensional join dependency, which generalizes the classical notion of join dependency by allowing the components of the join to be selected horizontally as well as vertically. Several properties of such dependencies are presented, including a generalization of many of the classical results known to be equivalent to schema acyclicity. Finally, a characterization of the nature of dependencies which participate in decompositions is presented. It is shown that there are two major types, the bidimensional join dependencies, which are tuple generating and allow tuple removal by implicit encoding of knowledge, and splitting dependencies, which simply partition the database into two components.