An Information-Theoretic Analysis of Relational Databases Part II: Information Structures of Database Schemas

  • Authors:
  • Tony T. Lee

  • Affiliations:
  • Bell Communications Research, Morristown, NJ

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 1987

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Abstract

The structural properties of acyclic database schemas, especially the interrelationships between acyclic join dependencies and multivalued dependencies, are examined in this paper. The intersection closure of a database schema is a semilattice, which is usually represented by Hasse diagram in algebra. The Hasse diagram of a schema is analogous to the Bachman diagram of a network model. Based on the topological structures of Hasse diagrams, the acyclic join dependency is proved to be equivalent to a set of conflict-free multivalued dependencies. Furthermore, we show that if the Hasse diagram is loop free, then the corresponding set of multivalued dependencies is also contention-free. This result is consistent with previous results derived from the Bachman diagram.