On interpretations of relational languages and solutions to the implied constraint problem

  • Authors:
  • Barry E. Jacobs;Anthony C. Klug;Alan R. Aronson

  • Affiliations:
  • Univ. of Maryland, College Park;Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison;Univ. of Maryland, College Park

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS)
  • Year:
  • 1982

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Abstract

The interconnection between conceptual and external levels of a relational database is made precise in terms of the notion of “interpretation” between first-order languages. This is then used to obtain a methodology for discovering constraints at the external level that are “implied” by constraints at the conceptual level and by conceptual-to-external mappings. It is also seen that these concepts are important in other database issues, namely, automatic program conversion, database design, and compile-time error checking of embedded database languages. Although this the deals exclusively with the relational approach, it also discusses how these ideas can be extended to hierarchical and network databases.